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This paper aims to explore the complete process and underlying mechanism that social enterprises obtain legitimacy during interactions with stakeholders from theoretical integration of institutional theory and organization ecology perspective.

Based on theoretical classification, this paper selects six typical Chinese social enterprises and conducts a multi-case analysis.

The study finds that social enterprises aim at legitimizing single entity or industry and shaping stakeholders’ cognitive boundary simultaneously. Therefore, by adopting constrained cooperation and competition activities, social enterprises use normative isomorphism to achieve personal legitimation and combining ecological niche construction, social enterprises achieve organizational legitimation. By adopting fragmented cooperation-dominant or competition-dominant activities, social enterprises use mimic isomorphism supplemented by competitive isomorphism or population structure creation to obtain industry legitimation. By adopting dynamically integrated coopetition activities, social enterprises use mimic isomorphism and reflexive isomorphism to reach field legitimation.

This paper proposes a mechanism model that the coopetition with stakeholders influences the legitimation process, identifies four stages of social enterprise’s legitimation process and the types of legitimacy obtained in each stage and fills the gap of Chinese indigenous social enterprise research.

This paper aims to introduce strategic management tools for companies with hybrid business models, for example, those with citizen participation. These models are often used of citizen renewable energy companies that have become a main pillar of the energy sector in Germany in recent years. The strategic management tools proposed here could help to achieve most of their objectives.

In the first step, a definition of hybrid businesses is derived by literature review, and the importance of strategic management in companies with citizen participation is discussed. In the next step, a new construct of a balanced scorecard (BSC) model is applied to citizen renewable energy companies by using survey data and previous studies.

Companies with citizen participation differ from profit-seeking companies and nonprofit organizations, and they are described by new hybrid business models. This study shows with a modification of the BSC that social or environmental aims are as important as financial ones to companies with citizen participation, which follow a double bottom line approach.

Hybrid businesses are important for the German energy sector, and strategic management tools are needed for their continued success and competitiveness. This paper can be a starting point for the management who want to implement these tools.

The paper addresses a gap in the strategic management literature on companies with citizen participation. The tools developed here can be modified for other hybrid businesses.

This paper describes the characteristics of the document supply industry and its products, and the factors underlying supply and demand. In order to cope with possible supply and demand shifts, appropriate adjustments that profit‐seeking suppliers and non‐profit‐seeking suppliers may adopt are also discussed.

Profits have a bad press. They are associated in the public mind with greed, avarice, self-seeking. The purpose of this paper is to make the case in behalf of profit-seeking, so as to right the balance of publications on this topic.

The authors undertake an economic analysis of the phenomenon of profit-seeking. The paper explores how profits lead to resource allocation, wealth creation, the promotion of human welfare and well-being.

The paper finds that the system of profit and loss, part and parcel of economic freedom and laissez faire capitalism, does indeed promote wealth. It is the last best chance to fight poverty. Contrary to the views of the economically illiterate, it does not cause inflation or the business cycle nor any other economic malady.

We cannot give ourselves good marks as to originality. Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard beat us to the punch as to the benefits of the profit and loss private property rights system. However, as Friedrich Hayek said each generation must fight these battles in its own context. So, the authors claim value for this paper, since it confronts more modern criticisms, and addresses more recent contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether profit maximizing behaviour can be defended from an ethical point of view, and what possible restrictions should be made on following this interest.

The main structure of the paper is as follows. First, it states the problem. Second, it considers which ethical theory is relevant for evaluating the situation at hand, and argues that rule‐consequentialism is the most appropriate one, but that some constraints in the form of, e.g. protecting human rights must be used as a supplement. Third, it analyses the consequences of profit seeking and profit maximization, and argue that these have a number of beneficial effects. The methodology and approach is one of critical argumentation.

Profit maximization as a firm goal has traditionally been meet with suspicion in the literature on business ethics, being seen as either immoral or amoral. It is argued herein that this practice should be evaluated according to rule‐consequentialist ethics, but supplemented with elements that are more of a deontological ethical character. When seen from this point of view, profit maximization may be seen as ethical. This requires, however, that a number of institutional and other requirements are fulfilled.

In stead of arguing, or taking as a premise, that profit maximization is inherently unethical, researchers should argue which ethical point of view should be used to evaluate such a goal, and then argue whether business practices are ethical or not. In addition, business ethics literature should incorporate basic insights from economic theory.

The paper provides new insights in the ethical nature of profit maximization as the main corporate value. More generally, we argued that, given it is in the owner's perceived interest(s), it is ethically justifiable for executives to take profit maximization as their ultimate goal in running their businesses, as long as they do not violate law, norms or social customs.

The management of the transformation process is commonly divided into production and service. Production is fairly easy to define but service has many definitions. These are discussed and it is concluded that debate over differences in production and service should be abandoned since they essentially function in the same way. Research should instead focus on the difference between profit‐making and non‐profit‐making institutions.

State‐owned enterprises (SOEs) have been described as being inefficient and losing money. The theories pretend that private property rights will solve the problem. In practice, SOEs are reorganized to follow the model of the private firm, a period known as the public sector corporatization. One critical element of this reform is an important modification of the mission of the firm away from social and toward profitability goals. Most SOEs become profit‐seeking organizations. The objective of this study is to examine the impact of the corporatization process on the financial performance of SOEs. From the Financial Post 500, we selected the largest SOEs in Canada. For each firm, the critical year of the mandate revision has been set as the beginning of the corporatization period. We covered the years between 1976 and 1996. The performance is measured from a multi‐criteria approach including measures of profitability and productivity. The results suggest that the financial performance of SOEs improves significantly when firms are corporatized. Therefore, the main difference in the financial performance is caused by the difference in the objectives of the firm, not the property or some dubious political activities.

This study aims to investigate the effects of different dimensions of social capital on individual knowledge transfer to nurture the organization’s intellectual capital, as well as the interactions among these dimensions and explore the potential moderators.

This study conducted a meta-analysis with 108 independent empirical studies to examine the different dimensions of social capital–knowledge transfer relationships and the effects of moderators and used meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM) to test the internal relationships among social capital dimensions.

The results show that structural, relational and cognitive social capitals are all positively related to knowledge transfer. In addition, different dimensions of social capital act as complements to one another. Further examinations reveal that the level of economic development has no significant moderating effect on the relationship between social capital and knowledge transfer. Then, the cultural context and profit climate characteristics moderate the relationship between social capital and knowledge transfer.

Leveraging the trilogy of signaling, learning and spillover effects, this meta-analytic study quantitatively integrates the relationships between different dimensions of social capital and knowledge transfer. It reconciles the present disparate findings, demonstrates the validity of different dimensional social capital interactions and obtains highly generalized conclusions. This study also introduces a dichotomy, saturation versus reinforcement, to explain the mixed results, which enriches social capital theory.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that entrepreneurs are motivated not only by the desire to maximize profits but also by the desire for mastery. It then attempts to analyze the implications of mastery seeking for the economics and politics of government privileges and favors for businesses.

Using the existing psychological literature on mastery as motivation the paper first attempts to conceptualize how the desire for mastery manifests itself in the context of entrepreneurship. Next, it attempts to clarify the implications of this for the existing literature on the effects of government policies promoting cronyism.

The paper argues that in business mastery involves producing a good product or service, and validation of the performance occurs via the choices of sovereign consumers. Mastery is thus achieved through participation in a process of competition that is free from government favors. Given that crony polices can disrupt the consumer choice process and consequently the validation of performance, they can therefore affect the types of individuals who become entrepreneurs, with a high level of government intervention pushing success seekers to pursue mastery in other life endeavors, with adverse implications for innovation and growth in the economy.

The exploration of implications of a plausible but underexplored motive for entrepreneurs and the interaction between this motive and the effects of various policies fostering cronyism or rent seeking are potential contributions of the paper.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the impact of environmental uncertainty on corporate social responsibility (CSR), and involves corporate financial investment as mediating factor into this relationship to identify whether Chinese enterprises pursue fame or profit under rising environmental uncertainty.

Data of listed companies in China from 2010 to 2019 are employed. Fixed effect and mediating effect models were used to explore the relationship between environmental uncertainty, corporate financial investment, and CSR. The heterogeneity influence and moderating effect are discussed by using the method of grouping test and adding interactive items.

The study finds that rising environmental uncertainty has a negative impact on CSR. It stimulates managements' short-sighted motivation, so that enterprises prioritize financial investment that can solve short-term goals, rather than CSR performance. This inhibitory effect is caused by holding illiquid financial assets with the motivation of “speculative profit seeking.” The negative effect is greater in the samples of state-owned enterprises, nonfamily enterprises and enterprises with low risk-taking.

It provides a decision-making direction for implementation of CSR governance and the construction of CSR system, particularly in emerging market economies.

CSR is widely known in developed countries for its formation, development and role, but its effectiveness and behavioral motivation are less mentioned in emerging markets. In the future, the research in this area needs to be further advanced.

The study makes significant contributions to the mechanisms behind the link between environmental uncertainty and CSR by taking corporate financial investment as an intermediary factor into the analysis, especially in the unique market context of China.