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Social enterprises have long been considered ideal settings for studying hybrid organizing due to their combination of social and economic goals and activities. In this chapter, the authors argue that the current research focus on hybrid organizing foregrounds the paradox, conflicting logics, and multiple identities associated with the pursuit of multiple goals but underappreciates the relationship between hybrid organizing and its institutional context. Recognizing that the primary objective of social enterprises is to tackle social problems, the authors introduce the social problem domain as an analytically useful and theoretically interesting meso-level to examine the role of context for hybrid organizing and to advance conversations on hybridity in organizational theory. Social problem domains offer insights into the political, cultural, and material differences in how various societies deal with social problems, which in turn affects hybrid organizing. The authors provide empirical insights derived from an analysis of social enterprises across three countries and social problem domains. The authors show how the institutional arrangements of social enterprises differ considerably across contexts, and how these arrangements affect how social enterprises become more or less similar compared to traditional ways of organizing in these problem domains. Based on these findings, the authors outline a research agenda on social enterprises that focuses on examining the nature, antecedents, and outcomes of hybrid organizing around social problems across multiple levels of analysis. With this chapter, the authors move the focus of social enterprise research in organizational theory from studying how these organizations cope with multiple logics and goals toward studying how they engage in markets for public purpose.

Purpose: This chapter aims to study the organizational challenges that arise from a hybrid character of organizations. Using a taxonomy of hybridization, based on the societal triangle, we provide a more comprehensive understanding of challenges that different archetypes of hybrid organizations face. This research focuses on enterprises providing private goods. Methodology/Approach: First, a taxonomy of hybridity is introduced based on the societal triangle of state, market, and society. Based on a literature search, we selected 75 articles to determine the main organizational challenges for the four hybrid archetypes. The organizational challenges are clustered in five themes: mission and balancing divergent goals, leadership, hiring and employee involvement, accounting and financial issues, and future outlook. The themes are discussed with 17 case organizations including social-oriented enterprises (SEs), as well as profit-driven enterprises that have moved toward different levels of hybridity. Findings: Our findings emphasize that different kinds of hybrid organizations face different kinds of challenges but also handle them differently. For SEs, the main challenges are related to financial value creation and future outlook, while for profit-oriented enterprises, the main struggles are related to leadership, employee involvement, and balancing divergent goals. Research Limitations/Implications (if applicable): This study is of an explorative nature, focusing on four hybrid archetypes and using broadly defined themes. Future research could involve all hybrid archetypes and define the challenges more succinctly. Originality/Value of Paper: Hybrid enterprises are usually classified according to typologies based on at least two different ways of thinking (“logics”). This paper uses a taxonomy based on the societal triangle which brings analytical clarity when defining hybridity and identifying challenges. Next to that we discuss organizational challenges with 17 organizations from different hybrid archetypes. The results show that depending on the archetype, organizations face different challenges and also handle these challenges differently.

As hybrid organizations become increasingly common, the authors observe that some hybrid forms are becoming institutionalized and legitimated. The authors explore the implications of the institutionalization of hybridity, addressing both the internal tensions that plague many hybrids and the external tensions stemming from evaluator assessments and stakeholder uncertainty. The authors propose that institutionalization can dampen internal tensions associated with hybridity and also facilitate legitimation and acceptance by external audiences. The authors present identity as a useful theoretical lens through which to examine these questions, as identities are born from, but also have the potential to modify, existing institutional arrangements. The authors present directions for future research at the juncture of identity, hybridity, and institutionalization, suggesting potential avenues of inquiry in this productive stream of research.

We contribute to the growing literature examining how social enterprises might best accommodate their hybrid structure when pursuing dual goals of social improvement and economic sustainability. Drawing on extant literature, the case is made for why synergy between the social and commercial business models that hybrid social enterprises employ should positively impact effectiveness in delivering organization outcomes. We then develop a method for comparing the synergy between the social and commercial business models employed within and across organizations, and test the method using a sample of seven social enterprises operating in different social fields. Results demonstrate that our method can be applied consistently across a range of social enterprise types and that variation in degree of synergy is considerable with overlap rates ranging from 9% to 77%. Using learning from this exploratory study, we develop propositions describing how and why social entrepreneurs develop business model synergy, the relationship between business model synergy and organizational performance, and suggest future research to test these propositions. Implications for theory development and practice are discussed.

We consider how the commercialization of social ventures may result from their founders’ personal experiences of commercial organizing. Building on theories of individual imprinting, we theorize that the commercialization of social ventures is influenced by two types of commercial experience: parental imprinting from the commercial work experience of a founder’s parents, and work imprinting from a founder’s professional experience within for-profit organizations. We find support for our theory based on analysis of a novel dataset of over 2,000 nascent social ventures and their founders. We further find that the marginal effects of additional work imprinting from a founder’s commercial experience decline with the longevity of this experience. We discuss implications of our findings for literatures on social ventures, imprinting, and hybrid organizations.

Alternative enterprises – organizations that operate as a business while still also being driven by a social purpose – are sometimes owned by workers or other stakeholders, rather than shareholders. What role does ownership play in enabling alternative enterprises to prioritize substantively rational organizational values, like environmental sustainability and social equity, over instrumentally rational ones, like profit maximization? We situate this question at the intersection of research on: (1) stakeholder governance and mission drift in both hybrid and collectivist-democratic organizations; and (2) varieties of ownership of enterprise. Though these literatures suggest that ownership affects the ability of alternative enterprises to maintain their social missions, the precise nature of this relationship remains under-theorized. Using the case of a global, social, and environmental values-based banking network, we suggest that alternative ownership is likely a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to combat mission drift in enterprises that have a legal owner. A supermajority of this network’s banks deploy alternative ownership structures; those operating with these structures are disproportionately associated with social movements, which imprint their values onto the banks. We show how alternative ownership acts through specific mechanisms to sustain enterprises’ missions, and we also trace how many of these mechanisms are endogenous to alternative ownership models. Finally, we find that ownership models vary in how well they enable the expression and maintenance of these social values. A ladder of mission-sustaining ownership models exists, whereby the dominance of substantive, non-instrumental values over operations and investment becomes increasingly robust as one moves up the rungs from mission-driven investor ownership to special shareholder and member-ownership models.

We explore a case example of hybridity between a large worker-owned cooperative and a union through three lenses: organizational forms, multiple institutional logics, and organizational identity. We delineate three types of organizational hybridity: (1) stretching an existing organizational form; (2) creating a new organizational form; and (3) and retaining multiple discrete organizational forms in a common venture. The cooperative–union hybrid shares members from the two contributing organizations, and so can be classified as a matrix sub-form of multi-organizational hybridity. This study describes how the coop-union hybrid manages the multiple logics and identities retained from both contributing organizations. It considers the hazards of combining these logics and identities, and offers some suggestions on how to avoid potential difficulties. Finally, given the complexity and inefficiencies of the matrix form, we explore whether matrix hybridity is a transitional or permanent form in this particular instance of a cooperative–union venture.

The chapter provides empirical research results on the peculiarities of social innovation and the specific features that its business model must support. It concludes by proposing a Social Innovation Business Model Canvas and steps towards Social Innovation typologies.

The research is based on the results of a comparative analysis of 25 business case studies and 32 biographies conducted within the SIMPACT research framework. We then implemented a process of reverse engineering to uncover the business models behind the cases which facilitated the creation of a typology for different social innovation business models. Reverse engineering is the application of tools and processes used to study new business ventures in comparison with existing ones. As such, it sheds further light on the broad characteristics of social business models and their value creation mechanisms. The evidence coming from the cases were analyzed within a new business model and clustered to identify a typology of business models of social innovations.

The main SIMPACT findings, resulting from the reverse engineering process and upon which our discussion is based, can be seen in the following distinguishing characteristics of SI business models. SI business models are: configured around finding complementarity between antagonistic assets and seemingly conflicting logics; often structured around a divergence in the allocation of cost, use, and benefit leading to multiple value propositions; modeled on multiactor/multisided business strategies, and developed as frugal solutions and through actions of bricolage. Four typologies of social innovation were identified: beneficiary as actor, beneficiary as customer, beneficiary as user, and community-asset-based models.

While much attention has been placed on for-profit business models, there is little literature on social/not-for-profit business models. This chapter can add to this gap by providing substantial empirical evidence.

Practitioners in the field of social innovation, particularly the growing intermediary sector, could integrate the findings of the research in their work.

The work is also leading to the construction of a future business toolbox for social innovation, which will be even more useful for incubators, accelerators, and supporting structures.

Research presented in this chapter is the result of an extensive comparative analysis across all of Europe, including examples of failure, and the first to propose a typology of SI Business Models.

To fulfill their economic and social missions, it is imperative yet challenging for hybrid ventures to demonstrate legitimacy (fitting in) while simultaneously projecting distinctiveness (standing out). One important means for doing so is by adopting and promoting the recent B Corporation certification. Drawing on a comprehensive analysis of the emergence of this certification, we argue that when it comes to promoting their businesses, hybrid ventures should not adopt a one size fits all approach. Rather, their promotion strategies need to be adapted to their specific contexts. We theorize and develop a typology of certification promotion strategies for hybrid ventures based on the relative prevalence of other hybrid ventures in the same regions and industries. We conclude by articulating why the B Corporation movement is a rich and underexplored context for scholarship on hybrid ventures, and highlight several promising future research directions.

Despite the increase in empirical studies of social enterprise in management and organization research, the lack of a cohesive knowledge base in this area is concerning. In this chapter, we propose that the underdevelopment of the attendant research infrastructure is an important, but oft-overlooked, barrier to the development of this body of empirical research.

We explore this proposition through a review of 55 empirical studies of social enterprises published in the last fifteen years, in which we examine the mix and trajectory of research methods used and the research infrastructure on which these studies depend.

We find that empirical research has used social enterprise largely as a context for theory development, rather than deductively testing, and thus building upon, existing theories. The latter pattern is due largely to the absence of two key dimensions of infrastructure: well-defined samples, and consistent, operational measures of social enterprise success. Finally, we identify present trends along both dimensions that contribute to changing the research infrastructure for empirical social enterprise research.

Our analysis highlights the critical need for research infrastructure to advance empirical research on social enterprise. From this perspective, research infrastructure-building provides an important opportunity for researchers interested in social enterprise and others interested in enabling high-quality empirical research in this setting.