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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.

This chapter identifies assumptions, conceptual issues and challenges in the literature on hybrid organizations that draws on the institutional logics perspective. The authors build on the existing literature reviews as well as on an analysis of the 10 most cited and 10 most recently published articles at the intersection of hybrid organizations and institutional logics. The authors further draw from the literature on theory construction and theory development and growth to strengthen our analysis of this body of work and reflect upon future theoretical developments. From this analysis, the authors highlight four challenges to current research on organizational hybridity with an institutional logics lens and develop four suggestions to inspire future research. In doing so, they aim at seeding a more nuanced use of the institutional logics perspective and thereby foster the development of innovative and cumulative theory and empirical research on organizational hybridity.

In current research on market categories, hybridity (i.e., the association of organizations and/or the products they offer with multiple category memberships) represents an important issue with many practical implications, especially for project-based forms of organizations. This chapter explores the evolution of hybridity and the conditions under which different kinds of project-based organizations develop hybrid projects. By studying the feature film industry in the United States from 1920 until 1970, this chapter contrasts the current perspective based on status-organizing processes and suggests that hybridity is a population-level process that can be interpreted as the result of the construction and interplay of different identities, and on the dynamic of the identity dimensions employed by different actors in such effort. The chapter shows that the development and construction of the identity of a temporary organization is different from other types of organizations, and is linked to identification processes both at the organizational level, with the company or with specific individuals in key roles, and at the institutional/collective level, with pure (single-category) and hybrid (multi-category) genres. This chapter highlights the mutual interactions and constraints between these two levels in different life stages of the film industry.

Scholars increasingly depict hybridity as pervasive across organizations. The authors offer insight about how paradox theory informs and expands this approach to hybridity. To do so, the authors do a deeper dive into paradox theory, comparing and contrasting a dynamic equilibrium approach with a permanent dialectics approach. Integrating these two approaches offers paradox theory insights that can enrich and expand hybridity scholarship. The authors offer suggestions for how paradox theory can help develop a future research agenda for organizational hybridity.

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.

In this chapter, the authors consider the relationships between institutional settlements at the field level and the instantiation of logics at the organizational level. The authors present the case of Supervised Consumption Sites (also known as Safe Injection Sites) in Alberta, Canada where a settlement of logics supported by one government was disrupted with the election of a new provincial government in 2015, and then disrupted again after the election of yet another government four years later. The authors use this case to show how different institutional settlements can support or threaten particular types of organizations, and they also show how the instantiation of different settlements in organizations (organizational hybridity) can impact the ways in which organizations present themselves. By analyzing the public justifications provided by key members of Supervised Consumption Sites, they draw attention to connections between institutional settlements at the field level and organizational attempts to manage multiple logics.

This paper examines the internationalization response of entrepreneurs in Hong Kong to the institutional upheaval of the Umbrella Revolution (UR), analyzed through the lens of post-colonial theory.

Inductive methods are applied to interview data on dimensions of ethnic background (local Chinese, regional Chinese and British expatriates) and geographical scope of business (Hong Kong only or global). The analysis consists of first-order concepts, second-order themes and aggregate dimensions which link the results to post-colonial theory and international entrepreneurial orientation (IEO).

Amongst informants with a high international entrepreneurial orientation (IEO), strategy response to upheaval is highly influenced by ethnic background and geographical flexibility in a post-colonial context. Applying Bhabhaian post-colonial theory, the Hong Kong UR is found to be a liminal space, where internationalization strategy in response to upheaval belies subconscious, ethics-laden constructions of post-colonial identity, manifesting in counterintuitive ways.

This paper addresses the paucity of studies on liminality and entrepreneurship and on how IEO responds to acute uncertainty in the business environment. Further, IEO is found to be an individual rather than a firm-level construct. Finally, a post-colonial theory is considered in a larger context of liminality and how the transitional self of entrepreneurs comes to terms with institutional upheaval.

The aim of this systematic literature review (SLR) is to map out the current state of the research on collaboration in the context of social entrepreneurship organisations (SEOs), synthesise this line of research and advance a research agenda.

A SLR of 40 scientific articles found in the Scopus and Web of Science databases built the foundation for an analysis of the state-of-the-art of the research addressing the interplay of SEOs and collaboration. This area of research has been very recent since the selected articles have been published since 2005 and more than half of which have appeared since 2017.

The findings suggest that collaboration is increasingly perceived as a crucial entrepreneurial activity and process for SEOs. The results indicate that collaboration is a vibrant and rapidly growing line of research which spans different fields of study, contexts, varied theoretical perspectives and multiple units of analysis. Furthermore, a total of five key research themes are identified pertaining to collaboration in the context of SEOs, such as motivations and strategies of collaboration, its antecedents, the interplay of institutional logics and tensions arising in collaboration, the impact of collaboration on the mission of SEOs and collaborative processes and practices.

To lend structure to this fragmented field of inquiry, this study systematically reviews and synthesises research on collaboration in the context of SEOs. In doing so, the study reveals that this line of research is under-researched, offering a significant scope for further scrutiny.

The sharing economy is the internet-enabled business model that has changed the way people travel, work and interact. Similar to other internet-enabled settings, trust is of paramount importance for the sharing economy as it leads to continued use and positive word-of-mouth. The main objectives of this research are twofold: (1) to identify the most relevant antecedents of trust in the sharing economy; and (2) to identify which combination of these antecedents allows repurchase intention and positive word-of-mouth to be achieved.

Through revision of trust theories and complementary frameworks, and an analysis of the sharing economy, the authors develop a model of trust for the sharing economy. The authors propose a model assuming that different types of trust will form a limited number of pathways valid for the creation of positive behavioural intentions. The authors use qualitative comparative analysis to empirically assess the proposed model on a sample of 235 sharing economy users.

The authors find two configurations that jointly suggest the key role of website quality and usability in generating consumer trust. The authors propose that, on the one hand, platforms might focus on creating value-added services and increasing the reliability of the platform brand. On the other hand, platforms can focus on creating good signalling mechanisms and educate their service providers towards reliable behaviour.

The authors build a conceptual model of trust in the sharing economy setting, that considers the feedback loops among the combination of several dimensions. The authors define specific strategies for platforms in the sharing economy that lead to repurchase intention and positive word-of-mouth.