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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 live in organizations addicted to problematic narratives. My purpose is to develop intelligent action understandings of how to care for organizations addicted to problematic elevator pitch narratives and one-sided stories by mapping quantum storytelling “Tamara-Land” forces ignored beneath and between them both (Boje, 1995). Tamara-land is the everyday activity of people in organizations chasing stories spatially distributed in different rooms, hallways, buildings that are temporally simultaneous, with materialities that are agential to the telling. For example, in this conference, the immersive theater into Tamara-Land is done in Steel Case open office spaces, as audience decides which actors to follow as they exit each scene. You cannot chase them all, and cannot be everywhere at once in this spacetimemattering. Quantum storytelling does not search for simple word or text messaging tag lines to explain open offices. Quantum storytelling uncovers deep behavior patterns of the spacetimemattering. “Quantum storytelling includes nondiscursive and behavioral aspects embodied in the storyteller’s life, in their living story behavioral-performative agentiality” (Boje, 1995, p. 114) and in nonhuman’s materialism featured in Karen Barad’s (2007) and Anete Strand’s material storytelling work. Quantum storytelling of Tamara-Land mapping at macro scale traces the interplay of people, planet, and profit (aka Triple Bottom Line, 3BL) but does not reduce it to imagined profitability metrics. I will critique 3BL for not proposing any method to measure people and planet first and by default reducing all dimensions to just bottom line profit measures. The consequence is that a runaway, maximizing fractal, known in socioeconomic work as the Taylor–Fayol–Weber rationality or “TFW virus” (Worley, Zardet, Bonnet, & Savall, 2015, pp. 23–24; Savall& Peron, 2015), attains functional structuralism (Alvesson & Spicer, 2012). In quantum storytelling fractal work, it’s “TFW fractal” profiteering that is destroying both planet and people, at an ever-accelerating rate (Boje & Henderson, 2014; Boje, 2015; Henderson & Boje, 2015). My contribution is to propose a different fractal pattern, the Mandelbrot fractal that actually sets limits on runaway fractal appetite. Both the 3BL and the VA techno-digital fractal narrative spiral more and more materials, energy, and people into the risk of an addictive TFW virus pattern, without limit.

Entrepreneurship education and training are an increasingly widespread component of governmental and nongovernmental efforts to address the interrelated challenges of youth unemployment and poverty reduction. In the absence of consensus regarding how best to design learning opportunities that effectively prepare youth to improve their livelihoods, this chapter explores the central debates surrounding three components that are integrated into most entrepreneurship training initiatives: learning, earning, and saving. Drawing on existing literature and considering three entrepreneurship training programs underway in East Africa, the authors argue that the effectiveness of any particular youth entrepreneurship program is highly dependent on a variety of contextual considerations, many of which are beyond the control of individual youth and program managers. Implications of this are that (a) program managers need to be modest in their expectations of program effects and avoid overpromising, (b) training is needed to help prepare youth to recognize, understand, and cope with various contextual factors that impact their livelihoods, and (c) NGOs and other private organizations that implement such programs are in a position to address certain contextual factors. By highlighting key debates relevant to the design of entrepreneurship training programs, this chapter contributes to the development of entrepreneurship training initiatives that are responsive to contextual realities, thereby increasing the potential effectiveness of entrepreneurship training as a poverty alleviation strategy.

Bolivia's original Aymara and Quechua quinoa producers ¹ exported 32,000 tons of hand-grown Royal Quinoa valued at $74 million in 2018. Nevertheless, they continued to fall deeper into poverty as low market prices did not cover the cost of their carefully planted, culturally driven production (IBCE, 2018, INIAF, 2018). Quinoa, now a global commodity, had seen increased competition from newly emerging quinoa growing countries with ample financial investment, improved production, and greater supply driving prices down. The more expensive, slow farming methods used by the Bolivian producers who followed traditional social, economic, and environmental sustainability practices were not valued in world markets. In Bolivia, the original quinoa homeland, once booming quinoa towns lay empty. Eighty-percent of inhabitants had moved to cities, leaving behind their native languages, traditions, and indigenous ways. Yet the culture and belief system lived on. This chapter examines Suma Qamana and how the Andean perspectives on social, economic, and environmental sustainability manifested themselves in the Bolivian experience of Aymara and Quechua quinoa producers. What follows is a story of Andean resilience in the face of globalization, and development gone awry.

In this chapter we describe an action research study on our course “Language and Literacy in the Early Childhood Curriculum.” We also explore links between the study and postmodern theory, embedding our analyses in an ongoing accreditation process. This required process positions us to question what authoritative narratives we have accepted and whether, through our action research, we have begun to create our own counternarrative that challenges assumptions underlying the accreditation process.

The legitimacy of history: dictated Bloch. Today, in many areas of knowledge, and of course in entrepreneurship (Wadhwani, 2010), it has become superlative. The aim of this chapter is analyzing the literature about entrepreneurship in Mexico mainly from the last 11 years of studies on the subject. Through this review, we want to highlight the progress in the field, as well as deeper opportunities in its research as a result of it, the profound need for incorporating them not only in the national academic debate but also into the entrepreneurship ecosystem and in specific public policies.