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Organizational sociology and organization studies have a long history together, while also sharing a proclivity to self-diagnose crises. Instead of taking these assessments at face value, this paper treats them as an object of study, asking what conditions have fueled them. In the case of organizational sociology, there are indications of a connection between rising levels of discontent and community building: self-identified organizational sociologists have progressively withdrawn from general debates in the discipline and turned their attention to organization studies, which, they suspect, has seen dramatic levels of growth at their expense. Organization studies, on the other hand, are still haunted by “a Faustian bargain”: leaning heavily on the authority of the social sciences, business school faculty were able to facilitate the emergence of a scholarly field of practice dedicated to the study of organizations, which they control. However, in doing so, they also set organization studies on a path of continued dependence on knowledge produced elsewhere: notably, by university disciplines such as sociology.

This study aims to identify the psychological factors predicting sociopreneurial intention (SEI) and gain insight into the conversion of SEI to sociopreneurial behaviour (SEB) in the presence of facilitating events (FE) as a moderating factor.

Hypotheses are statistically tested using a partial least square structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) based on purposive survey data (n = 110) from the leaders of dairy cooperatives in Indonesia. The measurement items are specifically developed for this research after thoroughly analysing the questionnaire items provided by prior studies.

The findings support the hypotheses that empathy (EM), perceived social responsibility (PSR) and self-efficacy (SEFF) are strong predictors of SEI. Moreover, although SEI can be directly converted to SEB, FE significantly moderated that conversion.

Future research should also involve the impact of SEB on the community and the sociopreneurs.

This research empirically examines the influence of external factors in converting SEI into SEB, which prior studies overlooked. Moreover, it involves the leaders of dairy cooperatives in Indonesia who perform SEB to help smallholder farmers’ communities facing dairy farming issues such as capital, milk productivity, land size and others as research participants.