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The purpose of this study is to examine the factors that drive superior social enterprise performance for women-led social enterprises. The authors examined the role of individual entrepreneur cognitive characteristics contributing to social enterprise performance and recommended a framework for women's social entrepreneur development.

The authors conducted an exploratory qualitative study of 22 women founders of social enterprises using a semi-structured questionnaire. In-depth interviews were conducted, and the transcripts were analyzed using thematic content analysis.

This study found a significant impact of self-efficacy on the performance of social enterprises among the studied subjects. Social support in the form of material, information and emotional support enhanced the ability of women social entrepreneurs to better achieve business sustenance and continuance of operations. The business skills of the women social entrepreneurs led them to move from just social impact generators to becoming thought leaders. The strong prosocial motivation of the founders contributed to building their resilience in the face of adversity.

This study extended the existing theories on social entrepreneurship by bringing the dimensions of entrepreneurial resilience in driving social enterprise performance along with business skills. Thus, it provided an enhanced explanation to the existing body of knowledge on contributors to superior social enterprise performance.

This study gathered insights into the role of entrepreneurship education focused on business skills, especially for women social entrepreneurs in achieving superior performance for their social ventures. This also reconfirmed the role of social support and how structurally this could be provided by educational systems to aspiring women social entrepreneurs.

The practice of social entrepreneurship by women social entrepreneurs has been growing. Its importance in developing economies because of its ability to make grassroots changes at the lower levels of society was substantive. Women have shown more inclination toward social business with an affinity for prosocial contribution. By focusing on nurturing these social enterprises, governments as well as global agencies like the United Nations and the World Economic Forum could accelerate social change. Furthermore, support for the current women social entrepreneurs as change-makers making a difference in society could be achieved.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research study was one of the first studies on women social entrepreneurs focusing on the factors of self-efficacy, social support and entrepreneurial resilience contributing to social enterprise performance. This study combined the social entrepreneurship intention theory with entrepreneurial resilience and business skills to understand the factors leading to successful social enterprise performance for women social entrepreneurs.

Corporate responsibility and sustainability (CRS) have emerged as an important topic today. At the same time, alliances and coopetition arrangements, as vehicles for inter-firm collaboration have been shown to support firm performance. Still, there has been a lack of research into how coopetition (collaboration with competing firms) in this area may support firm performance.

This study aims to untangle the relationship between coopetition arrangements including CRS and firm performance. The model permits garnering social performance, which is a key to CRS, and to move beyond the traditional view of the coopetition–firm–economic–performance relationship. This study is based on a survey and primary data from 215 firms in Australia. This study uses multiple indicators for the concepts. Relationships are estimated by multiple regression analyses.

Using survey data from 215 firms in Australia, the research findings confirm that coopetition in CRS can lead to improved firm performance, both in relation to financial and social performances. However, the association between coopetition in CRS and financial performance loses its significance when social performances is introduced as an additional control variable. Further, stakeholder attributes (i.e., effective power and legitimate stake) moderate the relationship between coopetition in CRS and firm financial performance. However, there was no evidence of moderation for the coopetition in CRS – firm social performance relationship.

This study contributes to both coopetition and corporate social responsibility research. This study demonstrates that improved firm performance may be achieved through the promotion of CRS initiatives when a coopetitive approach is adopted, particularly where an understanding of stakeholder attributes is also evident. Firms do not need to shoulder corporate social responsibility alone. They need to find well-fitting partners. There are new ways to improve sustainability in terms of nature and human relationships.

Firms do not need to shoulder Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) alone. They need to find well-fitting partners.

This study provides very novel insights by having integrated the literature on coopetition, corporate social responsibility and sustainability resulting in a new conceptual framework that combines coopetition in CRS and performance. The new conceptual framework has both practical and research implications for coopetition in CRS and firm performance.

This study examines the impact of environmental activity management (EAM) on triple bottom line (TBL) performance and the role that sustainability strategies play in mediating these relationships. Data were collected using a survey of Australian managers and analysed using structural equation modelling (SEM). The findings indicate that each of the three levels of EAM – Environmental Activity Analysis, Environmental Activity Cost Analysis, and Environmental Activity Based Costing – influence-specific aspects of performance, either directly and/or indirectly through environmental and social sustainability strategies. The findings suggest that managers could enhance their use of EAM practices through the use of sustainability strategies in order to enhance performance. This study provides empirical insight into the impact that EAM practices and environmental and social sustainability strategies have on all three aspects of TBL performance.

Research in the field of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has grown exponentially in the last few decades. Nevertheless, significant debate remains about the relationship between CSR performance and corporate financial performance (CFP). This is particularly true for the case of Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs). The purpose of the current study is to empirically test the relationship between CSR and CFP. We use data for 66 Chinese SOEs listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges. The results are interesting in that they are not consistent with similar studies using US and other Western market data. We find a significant negative relationship between CSR performance and CFP. The results are discussed in light of the preferential government treatment afforded to Chinese SOEs, and social welfare requirements imposed on such entities. Implications for Chinese policy-makers are discussed.

Despite all the attempts developed so far to measure corporate social performance in the last decades, a standard metric for it is still missing. In this work, the author tries to understand why is this the case. To do so, the author has reviewed 69 relevant metrics developed in the literature since the 1970s until today, covering approaches based on social, reputational, and environmental ratings, as well as several others constructed ad hoc by reputated scholars. The author analyzes each of them through a double optics, checking if they meet the minimum requirements to be considered standard and truly social. The research reveals that the main factor that prevents such a standard is the lack of truly social orientation of the existing metrics.

Project networks are an increasingly salient organisational temporary form to deal with complex problems. It remains unclear, however, whether and how project networks adapt over time, and hence implement changes, both within the span of the specific project, and across projects. The authors apply the performance feedback (PF) perspective to explore how adaptive responses to PF are organised and absorbed within project networks. The authors investigate these matters in the area of humanitarian and development aid efforts, which represent complex social issues. In this context, project networks involve a multitude of actors at different distances from the implementation field, ranging from the donor, through an international Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO), to the NGO’s country offices, local NGOs and the beneficiary communities. This study’s qualitative findings, which the authors generate through an abductive analytical process, highlight that project networks dealing with complex social issues face six paradoxes based on work by DeFillippi and Sydow: the distance, difference, identity, learning, temporal and performance paradoxes. Collective goal setting, adaptive monitoring and evaluation practices, and continuous re-negotiation of aspiration levels emerge as coping mechanisms enabling project networks to internalise insights from the field and translate them into adaptive behavioural responses, mainly at the intra-project level. The authors contribute to a better understanding of adaption in these temporary forms, and particularly in its behavioural consequences. The study also advances knowledge on the PF perspective, through its application in temporary settings, on the level of the project network and in the context of complex social issues, where organisational arrangements strive to pursue multiple interdependent goals.

This study aims to examine the potential threshold effect in the association between corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance and social reputation.

This study includes an international and cross-sector sample covering 41 countries, nine sectors and 45,395 firm-year observations. It applies a parabolic relationship, rather than linear regressions, between CSR engagement and social reputation via CSR awarding. This implies that CSR performance should increase until a certain point to gain a social reputation but then should decrease after reaching that threshold point considering limited financial resources.

The findings of country-industry-year fixed-effects logistic regressions confirm the threshold effect with an inverted U-shaped relationship between CSR and CSR awarding. More specifically, firms increase their environmental and social engagement until a certain point, and then they reduce it after reaching a social reputation. This finding is confirmed by three dimensions of the environmental pillar (i.e. resource use, emissions and eco-innovation) as well as four dimensions of the social pillar (i.e. workforce, human rights, community and product responsibility). The findings are robust to alternative samples, alternative methodology and endogeneity concerns.

The findings of this study have implications for firms about the better allocation of available funds between CSR and operations. The findings could be particularly useful for CSR teams/committees of the firms who formulate CSR policies and how to mobilize firm resources for better social enhancement via environmental and social reputation.

This study examines deeper the nature of the association between CSR engagement and social reputation and considers the possibility of an inverted U-shaped relationship between them. The determination of a threshold effect suggests that CSR engagement increases social reputation, but once it reaches a certain point, social reputation will decrease owing to financial resource constraints.

This study investigates the influence of social trust on the attainment of corporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) objectives.

This study conducts panel regression analysis on a distinctive dataset for 2009–2017 on Chinese firms.

The analysis reveals a significant positive association between social trust and firm-level ESG practices. Moreover, the impact of social trust on shaping ESG outcomes is further amplified by factors such as economic growth, corporate governance standards and institutional quality. This relationship remains statistically positive when the authors employ alternative measures and methodologies, such as the instrumental variables, propensity score matching and difference-in-differences approaches. Notably, the results of heterogeneity tests indicate that the Trust–ESG nexus is more prominent for state-owned enterprises and firms with substantial market capitalization, superior profitability and higher leverage.

This study expands the comprehension of the determinants of ESG and underscores the influential role of social trust as an informal institution in enhancing a firm's ESG performance.

We examine the perceived influence of externally generated firm ratings of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on voting for shareholder-sponsored CSR proposals. Using stakeholder and legitimacy theories, we introduce two rationales that relate shareholder voting decisions to the firm’s CSR performance: the complementary perspective where investors rely on management’s branding or image of the firm for CSR performance, and the sufficiency perspective where shareholders consider legitimacy effects of firm CSR performance. Our examination of 473 CSR shareholder-sponsored proposals during the 2013 to 2015 proxy seasons reveals a negative relationship between support for shareholder-sponsored CSR proposals and CSR strengths, particularly for social and environmental CSR strengths. We also find a positive relationship between support for shareholder-sponsored CSR proposals and CSR concerns, particular in the area of environmental CSR concerns. These results partially support the sufficiency perspective that incorporates shareholder legitimacy concerns. When companies have poor CSR performance, shareholders may view further CSR initiatives as beneficial to the firm.

In this chapter, I develop a theoretical framework to address the financial–social performance debate in strategy research, drawing on literatures on institutional logics and organizational forms.

I test the theoretical framework using an exploratory empirical approach based on ideal types with global microfinance data. A joint consideration of financial and social performances of microfinance organizations (MFOs) helps classify them into four ideal types – self-sustainable, mission-drifting, failing, and subsidized. I examine how an MFO’s organizational form and the configurations of institutional logics of the nation within which it is embedded jointly explain which ideal type the MFO falls into.

Based on a study of 1455 MFOs in 98 countries between 1995 and 2007, I show that the interactions between national institutional logics and organizational forms add significant predicting power in estimating MFOs’ ideal types. Explaining the intricate relationships between the financial and social performance of MFOs thus requires a simultaneous consideration of both the configuration of national logics and organizational forms.

The theoretical framework introduced in this chapter builds on recent developments in the institutional logics perspective and research on organizational forms, extending our understanding of the financial–social performance relationship among organizations. It also advances the social entrepreneurship literature by focusing our attention on various institutions at both national and organizational levels that may facilitate or inhibit social venture efficacy.