Search results

Social entrepreneurial leaders are persons who create and manage innovative entrepreneurial organizations or ventures whose primary mission is the social change and development of their client group. The social enterprise’s activities and its client group’s activities can primarily be either economic or non‐economic, but the mission is social change and development. This paper examines research prospects in social entrepreneurial leadership and its relevance to mainstream entrepreneurship research and proposes useful cross‐ fertilization opportunities.

This paper aims to investigate the role of field-configuring events (FCEs) and situational context in the institutionalisation of sustainability reporting (SR) in Pakistan.

This paper uses insights from the institutional logics perspective and qualitative research design to analyse the interplay of the institutional logics, FCEs, situational context and social actors’ agency for the institutionalisation of SR among leading corporations in Pakistan. A total of 28 semi-structured interviews were carried out and were supplemented by analysis of secondary data including reports, newspaper articles and books.

The emerging field of SR in Pakistan is shaped by societal institutions, where key social actors (regulators, enablers and reporters) were involved in the institutionalisation of SR through FCEs. FCEs provided space for agency and were intentionally designed by key social actors to promote SR in Pakistan. The situational context connected the case organisations with FCEs and field-level institutional logics that shaped their decision to initiate SR. Overall, intricate interplay of institutional logics, FCEs, situational context and social actors’ agency has contributed to the institutionalisation of SR in Pakistan. Corporate managers navigated institutional logics based on situational context and initiated SR that is aligned with corporate goals and stakeholder expectations.

For corporate managers, this paper highlights the role of active agency in navigating and integrating institutional logics and stakeholders’ expectations in their decision-making process. For practitioners and policymakers, this paper highlights the importance of FCEs and situational context in the emergence and institutionalisation of SR in developing countries. From a societal point of view, dominance of business actors in FCEs highlights the need for non-business actors to participate in FCEs to shape logics and practice of SR for wider societal benefits.

From a societal point of view, dominance of business actors in FCEs highlights the need for non-business actors to participate in FCEs to shape logics and practice of SR for wider societal benefits.

This paper focuses on the role of FCEs and situational context as key social mechanisms for explaining the institutionalisation of SR.

There is still no universal definition of the third sector in Europe, but it can be seen as including all types of non-governmental not-for-profit entities such as non-profit organizations, mutuals, cooperatives, social enterprises and foundations. This article attempts to make sense of the current shifting conceptualization of the third sector in Europe. It is based on short country summaries of the images and concepts of the third sector in 13 European countries by EMES Network’s members, first presented in 2008 (Defourny and Pestoff, 2008; nine of them were recently revised and are found in the appendix to this article.). The perception and development of the third sector in Europe is closely related to the other major social governance institutions/mechanisms, like the market, state and community and through the third sector’s interaction with them. Moreover, many third sector organizations (TSOs) overlap with these other social institutions, resulting in varying degrees of hybridity and internal tensions experienced by them. TSOs can generate resources from their activities on the market, by providing services in partnership with the state and/or by promoting the interests of a given community or group. The country overviews document a growing professionalization of TSOs in most countries and a growing dependency of public funds to provide services. This has important theoretical and practical implications for orienting the articles included in this book. Thus, it can provide a key for better understanding the discussion and analysis in the remainder of this volume.

Organizational studies of time tend to be done by academic researchers rather than practitioners. This chapter builds on academic research to provide a practitioner perspective by reviewing time situated in theory and constructing two phenotypes: timescapes of business and social time. These timescapes are defined by six dimensions, each with a social and business time parameter. Organizational business and social timescapes have different functions and applications. Timescapes, with their concomitant dimensions and sets of parameters, are used differently by senior managers, middle managers, and entry-level managers. Three multi-level approaches (self, dyadic, and social relationships), composition theory, and compilation theory confirm these three managerial timescape usages. After a review of the theoretical bases of the timescape constructs and a brief discussion of the grounded, anthropological, research methodology used in the study, this chapter applies timescape theory and models to an extended time case study of the Procter & Gamble Company that frames the company's timescape understanding and use from a practitioner's view.

This chapter outlines the nascent history of the Benefit Movement, discusses the theoretical implications that predict the long-term success of movement goals, and provides recommendations for firms who seek to safeguard practices of corporate social responsibility (CSR). The chapter provides an overview of Benefit forms and describes the indicators of Movement success. For the Benefit Movement to achieve success, it must establish legal options in all 50 states for Benefit incorporation, pave the way for both publicly and privately held organizations to incorporate, and mobilize diverse organizational actors with high levels of commitment to sustain contention for Movement goals. The chapter provides a framework to understand how the Movement can achieve its goal of safeguarding the effective practice of CSR within firms and across the planet.

Accountability is ubiquitous in social systems, and its necessity is magnified in formal organizations, whose purpose has been argued to predict and control behavior. The very notion of organizing necessitates answering to others, and this feature implies an interface of work and social enterprises, the individuals comprising them, and subunits from dyads to divisions. Because the nature of workplace accountability is multi-level as well as interactive, single-level conceptualizations of the phenomenon are incomplete and inherently misleading. In response, this chapter sets forth a meso-level conceptualization of accountability, which develops a more comprehensive understanding of this pervasive and imperative phenomenon. The meso model presented integrates contemporary theory and research, and extends our perspectives beyond individual, group, unit, or organizational perspectives toward a unitary whole. Following this is a description of challenges and opportunities facing scholars conducting accountability research (e.g., data collection and analysis and non-traditional conceptualizations of workplace phenomenon). Theoretical and practical implications are discussed, as are directions for future research.

The purpose of this conceptual chapter is to analyze the current state of the astructural bias in symbolic interactionism as it relates to three inter-related processes over time: (1) the formalization of critiques of symbolic interactionism as ahistorical, astructural, and acritical perspectives; (2) an ahistorical understanding of early expressions of the disjuncture between symbolic interactionism and more widely accepted forms of sociological theorizing; and (3) persistent and widespread inattentiveness to past and present evidence-based arguments that address the argument regarding symbolic interactionism as an astructural, ahistorical, and acritical sociological perspective. The argument frames the historical development of the astructural bias concept in an historically and socially conditioned way, from its emergence through its rejection and ultimately including conclusions about contemporary state of the astructural bias as evidenced in the symbolic interactionist literatures of the last couple of decades. The analysis and argument concludes that the contemporary result of these intertwined historical and social conditioning processes is that the astructural bias myth has been made real in practice, and that the reification of the myth of an astructural bias has had the ruinous effect of virtually eradicating a vital tradition in the interactionist perspective which extends back to the earliest formulations of the perspective. As a result, a handful of suggestions that serve to aid in reclaiming the unorthodox structuralism of symbolic interactionism and the related interactionist study of social organization are provided in the conclusion.

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.

Miller McPherson's approach to measuring the inherent duality of organizational forms and the environmental niches that they occupy is adapted and applied to an analysis of the institutional field of (outdoor) poverty relief organizations operating in New York City (1888–1917). In contrast to McPherson's approach that emphasizes how organizations are differentially arrayed within “Blau space,” this chapter focuses on how organizational forms are distributed across an institutional “logic space” that is itself dually ordered and defined by the kinds of organizational forms that are understood to exist. The resulting niche maps are employed to trace out the jurisdictional conflicts that erupted during the Progressive Era between two competing organizational forms – scientific charities and settlement houses – each of which embodied a particular vision and practice for delivering social relief to the poor.

This paper aims to explore the complete process and underlying mechanism that social enterprises obtain legitimacy during interactions with stakeholders from theoretical integration of institutional theory and organization ecology perspective.

Based on theoretical classification, this paper selects six typical Chinese social enterprises and conducts a multi-case analysis.

The study finds that social enterprises aim at legitimizing single entity or industry and shaping stakeholders’ cognitive boundary simultaneously. Therefore, by adopting constrained cooperation and competition activities, social enterprises use normative isomorphism to achieve personal legitimation and combining ecological niche construction, social enterprises achieve organizational legitimation. By adopting fragmented cooperation-dominant or competition-dominant activities, social enterprises use mimic isomorphism supplemented by competitive isomorphism or population structure creation to obtain industry legitimation. By adopting dynamically integrated coopetition activities, social enterprises use mimic isomorphism and reflexive isomorphism to reach field legitimation.

This paper proposes a mechanism model that the coopetition with stakeholders influences the legitimation process, identifies four stages of social enterprise’s legitimation process and the types of legitimacy obtained in each stage and fills the gap of Chinese indigenous social enterprise research.