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Purpose: This literature review aims to answer the calls for further exploration of scaling challenges and opportunities for social entrepreneurs (SEs). We address the scaling issue of social entrepreneurship through the theoretical lens of sustainable business models. Methodology: This paper investigates, on a multilevel approach, 340 journal articles published in one of the 20 peer-reviewed journals in management, entrepreneurship, CSR, organizational behavior, and nonprofit. It also considers influential articles due to their relatively high citation count (i.e., more than 150 times) outside of those selected journals. This paper furthermore analyses in-depth 32 scaling articles. Findings: This study positions the topics of social entrepreneurship over the last decades, together with the six types of scaling strategies: scaling up, scaling down, scaling across, scaling deep, scaling out, and diversification. It also discusses 15 challenges related to the scaling efforts by SEs. It furthermore elaborates on potential leads for research and practice regarding scaling social impact. Social Implications: There are many pathways for SEs to increase their impact on society, even though it remains quite challenging to achieve for most. Understanding what possibilities or limitations apply to individual SEs is but a first step in developing the full potential of social entrepreneurship. Originality: This paper approaches scaling from three complementary levels of analysis, i.e., individual, organizational, and institutional. Thus we provide more clarity and a nuanced perspective on past and future research regarding scaling challenges and opportunities.

Social entrepreneurs create novel approaches to social problems such as poverty. But scaling these approaches to the dimension of the problem can be a difficult task. In the social enterprise sector, the subject of scaling has become a key dimension of organizational performance. This chapter advances the scholarly literature on the scaling of social enterprises, a literature which is currently in an embryonic stage and characterized by conceptual ambiguity and fragmented perspectives.

We engage realist philosophy of science to develop mechanism-based causal explanations of the scaling performance of social enterprises. We also develop a coding scheme to guide systematic empirical analysis and highlight the explanatory power of counterfactuals. Counterfactuals have been largely neglected in empirical research as they represent mechanisms that are enabled but remain unobservable – in a state of suppression or neutralization of their effects.

We question the ability of organizations to “socially engineer” desired outcomes and introduce a new construct – organizational closure competence. Anchored in realism, this construct provides a basis for productive approaches to social engineering. We elaborate on the importance of organizational closure competencies for scaling, derive a series of propositions, and develop ideas for future research and for practice.

Applying a realist lens allows us to add empirical rigor to research on social enterprises and scaling. Our approach constitutes a move from rich narratives to causal models and informs the way we design and evaluate efforts to address important societal challenges.

This chapter demonstrates how to operationalize realist philosophy of science for causal explanations of complex social phenomena and better utilize its theoretical and practical value.

The root of urban poverty and inequality often results from limited economic opportunity. Yet, often this perception of lack of opportunity is centered on the early stages of new venture formation, with only limited attention to venture growth and expansion. In this study, we explore the intersection of social venturing and community economic redevelopment to address this gap in the literature. We examine how venturing under conditions of limited economic opportunities occurs not just at the formation stages but also throughout the venturing life cycle. Specifically, we examine how ventures formed in distressed, urban neighborhoods face unique challenges when scaling up their operations. These challenges relate to securing and leveraging four types of capital: financial, physical, human, and social. We employ a case study methodology to examine these scaling challenges and the strategies the organization employed to overcome location disadvantages.

Identifying the dimensionality of a construct and selecting appropriate items for measuring the dimensions are important elements of marketing scale development. Scales for measuring marketing constructs such as service quality, brand equity, and marketing orientation have typically been developed using the influential classical test theory paradigm (Churchill, 1979), or some variant thereof. Users of the paradigm typically assume, albeit implicitly, that items and respondents are the only sources of variance and respondents are the objects of measurement. Yet, marketers need scales for other important managerial purposes, such as benchmarking, tracking, and perceptual mapping, each of which requires a scaling of objects other than respondents such as products, brands, retail stores, websites, firms, advertisements, or social media content. Scales that are developed without such objects in mind might not perform as expected. Finn and Kayande (2005) proposed a multivariate multiple objective random effects methodology (referred to here as M-MORE) could be used to identify construct dimensionality and select appropriate items for multiple objects of measurement. This chapter applies M-MORE to multivariate generalizability theory data collected to assess online retailer websites in the early 2000s to identify the dimensionality of and to select appropriate items for scaling website quality. The results are compared with those produced by traditional methods.

Digital business models are often designed for rapid growth, and some relatively young companies have indeed achieved global scale. However, despite the visibility and importance of this phenomenon, analysis of scale and scalability remains underdeveloped in management literature. When it is addressed, analysis of this phenomenon is often over-influenced by arguments about economies of scale in production and distribution. To redress this omission, this paper draws on economic, organization, and technology management literature to provide a detailed examination of the sources of scaling in digital businesses. We propose three mechanisms by which digital business models attempt to gain scale: engaging both non-paying users and paying customers; organizing customer engagement to allow self-customization; and orchestrating networked value chains, such as platforms or multi-sided business models. Scaling conditions are discussed, and propositions developed and illustrated with examples of big data entrepreneurial firms.

Purpose – Despite the increasing use of formative measurement models in literature, little is known about potential consequences for substantive theory testing. Against this background, the aims of this chapter are (1) to highlight some problems that may arise when formative instead of reflective measures are used to test even simple theoretical models with covarianced-based methodologies, (2) to illustrate some approaches that might help overcome these problems, (3) to pinpoint potential interpretation difficulties of the results involving re-specified measurement models, and (4) to stimulate discussion on the implications for theory development when models are tested with formative measures.

Methodology/approach – Potential consequences of formative measurement models for theory testing are highlighted using an empirical study on consumer animosity as an illustrative example and applying covarianced-based structural equations modeling procedures for estimation purposes.

Findings – The empirical study shows (a) that some scaling options for the (composite) latent variable result in non-convergence problems, (b) that, assuming convergence, parameter estimates, standard errors, and significance levels vary depending on the scaling method used, and (c) that goodness-of-fit statistics cannot be used as diagnostic measures for the appropriateness of divergent results.

Originality/value of paper – The contribution of this chapter is two-fold: First, it shows that to enable estimation, it is often necessary to modify (i.e., expand) the original theoretical model in a conceptually reasonable manner and to do so before data collection. Second, it demonstrates that alternative scaling options for composite latent variables may result in inconsistent substantive conclusions. Consequently, the impact of formative measurement on theory testing is a critical topic and needs to receive further attention in future literature.

Social enterprises (SEs) have become important new actors in solving grand challenges in a VUCA world. Nevertheless, International Business (IB) research has paid little attention to them. To address this gap, we draw upon a comparative case study of two SEs: one addressing poverty and the other tackling ocean plastics pollution. Our analysis uncovers two issue-specific internationalization paths: a multi-local path and a born-glocal path. On the basis of the findings, we re-conceptualize internationalization in the context of SEs as an ongoing, issue-specific process of social impact scaling through bricolage, global optimization, and local integration. We conclude by offering suggestions for further accounting for SEs in the IB research agenda.

Scholarship on alternative organizations and cooperatives has argued that networks and intermediaries foster organizational form stability and protect collectivist-democratic organizations from rationalization as well as decoupling. This study of field-level organizing among food co-ops in the United States shows that rather than buffering collectivist organizations from conventional market and rationalization pressures, meta-organizations can also serve as a conduit for rationalizing pressures, subjecting vulnerable organizations to what I call quasi-coercive isomorphism. Using interviews of field participants, ethnographic observations of conferences, and content analysis of organizational documents, I examine the formation and impact of National Co+op Grocers, a meta-cooperative created to leverage scale and pool resources among food co-ops. I find that this meta-organization enforced grocery industry-oriented norms of operation, management, and presentation among its member organizations in return for providing mutual liability and economies of scale. This focus on select operationally scalable processes and structures for support generated isomorphic pressures that exposed, rather than sheltered, co-ops, especially smaller, resource-poor ones, from industry standards. The meta-organization thus promoted a sectorized model of more marketized practices for the field’s cooperatives that pushed co-ops to adopt conventional grocery store practices and distanced them from the practices of other cooperative form fields. Moreover, the potential of cooperative form-specific elements for scaling was not realized: collective ownership and democratic governance remained local concerns. These findings suggest that whether meso-level cooperation among cooperatives can support alternative form maintenance is contingent on the structure and scope of the meta-organization and on the perceived scalability of operational and governance elements of the cooperative organizational form.