Entrepreneurship has been highlighted as one of the major forces in addressing significant economic, social, and environmental challenges. These challenges have raised new ethical questions, leading to an explosive growth of research at the intersection of ethics and entrepreneurship. This study provides an overview of the evolution of the scientific literature on the interplay between ethics and entrepreneurship to propose a research proposition with standardized protocols and a broad time limit. Specifically, in a hybrid literature review, 516 articles from peer-reviewed (...) journals indexed in Scopus were analyzed. The review revealed that the field mainly comprises six themes. Through the analysis of each theme, gaps are identified and structured and used to build theoretical proposals for future research agendas applied to current societal challenges. Understanding the link between entrepreneurship and ethics guides practices improves decisions, addresses challenges, promotes sustainability, enhances academia, and builds trust, fostering a responsible, beneficial entrepreneurial environment for society and the economy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Despite 40 years of equal opportunities policies and more than two decades of government and organization initiatives aimed at helping women reach the upper echelons of the corporate world, women are seriously underrepresented on corporate boards. Recently, fifteen countries sought to redress this imbalance by introducing gender quotas for board representation. The introduction of board gender quota legislation creates ethical tensions and dilemmas which we categorize in terms of motivations, legitimacy, and outcomes. We investigate these tensions through four overarching theoretical (...) perspectives: institutional, stakeholder, social identity, and social capital. We outline a future research agenda based on how these tensions offer greater focus to research on quotas and more broadly to ethics and diversity in organizations in terms of theory, anticipated ethical tensions, data, and methodology. In sum, our review seeks to synthesize existing multidisciplinary research and stimulate future enquiry on this expanding set of legislation. (shrink)

Using Giddens’s structuration theory and empirical data from a study with social enterprise stakeholders, the article explores how social entrepreneurs and the structure co-create one another. We show that the development of the contemporary significance of social entrepreneurialism lies in a combination of complex context-specific structural forces and the activities of agents who initiate, demand, and impose change. Social entrepreneurs intentionally tackle social challenges, but their actions bring unintentional results, such as the transfer of state responsibilities onto communities. Direct outputs (...) of their activities introduce indirect outcomes, bringing wider changes in culture and policy. The evolving nature of entrepreneurship and a number of factors that interplay in time and space, and enable and constrain social entrepreneurs, confirm the applicability of Giddens’s theory in the field of social entrepreneurship. The originality of this article derives from revealing mechanisms that enable social entrepreneurs to emerge and reasons for structural change. We also build a “co-creation model of structure and agency” that can be used to “engineer” the process of social entrepreneurship. (shrink)

Many challenges to economic and social well-being require close collaboration between business, government, and civil-society actors. In this context, the involvement of multiple companies rather than a single company may enhance such cross-sector social partnerships’ outcomes. However, extant literature cautions about the tensions arising from companies’ competitive interests and the detrimental effects on the CSSP’s social outcome. Similarly, studies analyzing simultaneous collaboration and competition suggest shielding off competitive elements from the collaboration. Based on insights into two multi-company CSSPs, we conversely (...) find that government and NGO partnership managers deliberately leveraged competition through the CSSP design. They used similar segmentation mechanisms to enhance CSSP contributions, but differed in the way they integrated collaborative and competitive elements, leading to sustained corporate commitment in one CSSP and unmet promises in the other. These insights expose the paradoxical nature of coopetition at the interface of social and economic goals, and advance current research by indicating competition’s positive effects and the respective partnership design implications. On this basis, our study helps reveal and better understand sustainability-related tensions and opportunities at the inter-organizational level. (shrink)

This study endorses the use of data envelopment analysis, which uses benefit-of-the-doubt weighting to evaluate the social, economic and overall performance of social enterprises. This methodology is especially useful for creating composite indicators based on multiple outputs expressed in different measurement units, and allows for enterprise-specific weighting of the different objectives. Applying this methodology on a unique longitudinal dataset of Flemish sheltered workshops suggests that social enterprises may face different types of mission drift. Further, our results show that top-performing social (...) enterprises are more economically and socially efficient than low performers. These top performers also have a stronger economic orientation, which sheds new light on the balance between social and economic orientations in social enterprises. (shrink)

While research has focused on financial and social goals in impact investing, we add to the limited research that focuses on how individuals manage identity multiplicity, defined as three or more role identities. Based on our qualitative study of Christian impact investors, we develop a model of identity multiplicity work, explaining how individuals manage their multiple role identities to reduce identity tensions during the process of impact investing. We find individuals engaged in an interactive, ongoing three-step process of identity multiplicity (...) work: prioritizing one of their salient identities, managing their identity multiplicity interrelationships, and reinforcing their prioritized identity. Investors generally prioritized an identity that was neither financial nor social, but rather religious. We also find this identity work implemented through three novel mechanisms: shadowing, one identity casts a shadow over another thereby enabling the simultaneous pursuit of related goals; distinguishing, all identities are retained and at least a minimum threshold of role expectations are met; and surrendering, partial sacrificing of goals of one identity in favor of another identity based on an individual’s self-reflective importance of the role. Our findings offer new insights to multiple identities, impact investing and business ethics literatures. (shrink)

Integrating corporate social responsibility (CSR) into a for-profit organization’s business activities is fraught with tensions. This paper reports a case study of a construction company, exploring how different tensions emerged to challenge company-level aspirations for strategic CSR integration. The study identifies three types of persistent CSR tensions and four management practices, discussing how the management practices led the organization to navigate CSR tensions in both active and defensive ways. Furthermore, the study explicates why the case company succeeded in integrating CSR (...) into formal business strategy and shared attitudes but struggled with CSR integration in the domain of day-to-day operations. The paper contributes to the CSR literature by developing a tension-centric perspective on CSR development. It highlights the necessity of tension navigation at both the organizational and the action levels, the key role of active (as opposed to defensive) navigation of CSR tensions, and the importance of alignment between organizational and action levels in navigating tensions for sustaining strategic focus on CSR over time. (shrink)

Over the last two decades, corporate sustainability has been established as a legitimate research topic among management and organization scholars. This introductory article explores potential avenues for advances in research on corporate sustainability by readdressing some of the fundamental aspects of the sustainability debate and approaching some novel perspectives and insights from outside the corporate sustainability field. This essay also sketches out how each of the six articles of this special issue contribute to the literature by going back to some (...) of the conceptual roots of sustainability and/or by offering novel perspectives for research on corporate sustainability. As these six articles and the outlook on future research opportunities show, broadening the inquiry of corporate sustainability in terms of topics, theories, and methodologies holds considerable potential to improve our understanding of how decision makers and organizations respond to sustainability. (shrink)

As the gap between the world’s rich and poor grows wider and the limitations of institutional solutions such as foreign aid continue to be exposed, students of development are shifting their focus toward individualistic business-based solutions that seek to draw members of marginalized communities into the global marketplace. This focus on the individual, however, raises three interconnected issues: it privileges a view of the human person as individualistic versus relational, it proposes isolated solutions that are not scalable, and it can (...) leave would-be change agents feeling hopeless. Drawing on insights from sociology, political philosophy, and Catholic social thought, the current paper presents an alternative path to educating for an inclusive economy by arguing that our greatest structural challenges require us not to abandon institutional solutions but rather to develop better institutions rooted in a fuller notion of the human person. Specifically, by cultivating a mindset of relationality through immersion experiences and mindfulness practices, we propose that business education can empower students to develop hope-filled solidarity with the marginalized, understand their role in the global economic system, and as future business leaders, build virtuous institutions for the common good. (shrink)

An increasing amount of research has examined the management of competing logics, and possible tensions arising between them, within “hybrid organizations.” However, the ways in which the relationships of hybrids with other organizations shape the conciliation of these logics and tensions have received limited attention so far. In this theoretical paper, we examine how hybrid organizations deal with interorganizational collaboration, in particular whether and how their hybridity can be maintained when they partner with “dominant-logic organizations.” Drawing on empirical literature on (...) social enterprise–corporate collaborations, we develop a framework and several propositions on how competing logics and their balancing within hybrid organizations may be affected by interactions with organizations underpinned by one dominant logic. We suggest that influences will mostly depend on the type of collaboration pursued. A collaboration based on a lower level of engagement and interaction between the two partners is likely to give precedence to one logic over the other, reducing inter-logic tensions but possibly compromising organizational hybridity. By contrast, a collaboration featuring numerous interactions and mission compatibility may facilitate sustained hybridity if tensions are acknowledged and managed. Our propositions contribute to the literatures on hybrid organizations, interorganizational collaboration, and social enterprise. (shrink)

BackgroundThe health sector aims to improve health outcomes and access to healthcare. At the same time, the sector relies on unsustainable environmental practices that are increasingly recognised to be catastrophic threats to human health and health inequities. As such, a moral imperative exists for the sector to address these practices. While strides are currently underway to mitigate the environmental impacts of healthcare, less is known about how health researchers are addressing these issues, if at all.MethodsThis paper uses an interview methodology (...) to explore the attitudes of UK health researchers using data-intensive methodologies about the adverse environmental impacts of their practices, and how they view the importance of these considerations within wider health goals.ResultsInterviews with 26 researchers showed that participants wanted to address the environmental and related health harms associated with their research and they reflected on how they could do so in alignment with their own research goals. However, when tensions emerged, their own research was prioritised. This was related to their own desires as researchers and driven by the broader socio-political context of their research endeavours.ConclusionTo help mitigate the environmental and health harms associated with data-intensive health research, the socio-political context of research culture must be addressed. (shrink)

Business sustainability aims to combine market logic with social welfare logic. In literature, it is commonly assumed that sustainability and the social welfare logic associated with it are characterized by a long-term orientation. However, this assumption is problematic because this principle may not apply in certain contexts. This qualitative study challenges this assumption and focuses on the mechanisms by which time affects the adoption of sustainability practices in the context of socially responsible investing (SRI) practices in Swiss banks and insurance (...) companies. The article provides insights into the mechanisms associated with different time horizons and investigates their effects on the adoption of SRI in financial intermediaries. It also shows how the dimension of time shapes interactions between the two institutional logics underlying SRI in business organizations through specific mechanisms. (shrink)

In this article, we apply deductive content analysis to the 100 most influential publications in the field of social entrepreneurship to identify the normative assumptions in SE scholarship. Using eight contemporary schools of thought in political philosophy as a template for analysis, we identify the philosophies underlying SE literature and the important consequences of their normative stances, such as: ambiguous concepts, justifications and critiques, and normative contradictions. Our study contributes to the SE literature by proposing that political philosophy can help (...) to identify what counts as the ‘social’ in SE. We are showing some of the field’s inherent normative tensions that could dampen its impact, and propose ways in which a normative awareness would help to establish a basis upon which to evaluate and demonstrate the social, economic, and cultural impact of SE. (shrink)

This study explores social enterprises’ strategies for addressing mission drift. Relying on an inductive comparative case study of two Italian social enterprises, we show how stakeholder engagement combined with social accounting can successfully support a social venture to re-balance its positioning between wealth generation and social value creation. Indeed, stakeholder engagement helps the internal actors of a social enterprise to rationalize and embody pro-social values previously abandoned, while social accounting reinforces this embodiment process by showing the reintroduced social commitment of (...) the social enterprise to external audiences. Conversely, strategies focused only on social accounting and without significant engagement of external stakeholders prove to be unsuccessful in counterbalancing mission drift because they fail to activate the necessary process of internal re-introduction and operationalization of pro-social values and objectives. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:In this study, we investigate how different internal and external stakeholders influence the innovation strategy of a social enterprise to adopt product, process, and partnership innovations that impact either social or commercial performance. Relying on survey data from a sample of work integration social enterprises, we find that in situations of turbulence, administrative leaders do not significantly influence the innovation strategy of a social enterprise. Instead, board members and external stakeholders seem to play a role. Our study contributes to strategic (...) and business ethics research on social enterprises and, more broadly, to the literature that explores how business organizations combine social value creation and wealth generation. (shrink)

Although the simultaneous presence of multiple ambitions is inherent in hybrid venturing, pursuing social and/or environmental missions while securing commercial viability can generate ambivalence among stakeholders. In this study, we draw on the notion of “holism” to show how venture founders both embrace tensioned ambitions and sustain hybridity during critical venture development phases. Based on 6 years of data on The People’s Supermarket in the United Kingdom, we identify three distinct practices— fantasizing, bartering, and conjuring—used by founders to harness tensions (...) productively, without compromising their venture’s multiple ambitions. These practices demonstrate the founders’ ability to maintain a venture’s hybrid nature throughout the ideation, organizational, and scale-up phases, thereby shedding light on the application of “holism” within the realm of hybrid venturing. (shrink)

Given the urgency of global crises, interest abounds in alternative organizational forms (e.g., multistakeholder social enterprises, MSEs), promising structural solutions to engage diverse stakeholders in the creation of joint social, economic, and democratic values. Yet, studies of the who, how, and why of stakeholder engagement are predominantly rooted in for-profit contexts, assuming objective boundaries between insider/outsider stakeholders and engagement as a means to an end. The context of MSEs challenges both of these assumptions. Based on interviews with leaders of 28 (...) French MSEs, I show how the latter made sense of their expectations versus the reality of stakeholder engagement. Leader sensemaking strategies informed the enactment of (revised) stakeholder engagement strategies to maintain coherence, or address misalignment, between expectations and reality. The article contributes to the literature by challenging assumptions of stakeholder engagement in for-profit firms. It also cautions against an overreliance on designated organizational forms to enable substantive stakeholder engagement. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has repeatedly been described as an “essentially contested concept,” which means that its signification is subject to continuous struggle. We argue that the “CSR institution” (CSRI; i.e., the set of standards and rules regulating corporate conduct under the banner of CSR) is legitimized by narratives which “decontest” the underlying concept of CSR in a manner that safeguards the CSRI from calls for alternative institutional arrangements. Examining several such narratives from a structuralist perspective, we find them to (...) be permeated with six recurrent ambiguities that we show to be reflective of three deep-set taboos: the taboo of the noncongruency between corporate profit objectives and societal needs, the taboo of multinational firms’ continued contribution to the emergence of global socioenvironmental issues, and the taboo of the CSRI’s moderate results in solving these problems. We contend that the perpetuation of these taboos contributes to inhibiting substantial change in the way of doing business, and we sketch out possibilities for initiating a “recontestation” of CSR’s meaning. (shrink)

Social enterprises are seen as innovative towards solving societal problems, but little research exists on possible negative aspects, the so‐called dark sides. In this study, the emphasis is on dark sides of social entrepreneurship, how they are managed, and how systems thinking can contribute towards managing these effects. Dark sides of social entrepreneurship can take many forms, like unethical or insincere motives and unintended outcomes like the negative impact on the well‐being of founders and employees, but they are also a (...) call for a critical reflection on the role of the government in society and the economic system social enterprises have to operate in. This paper aims to contribute to the dark side theory of social entrepreneurship by linking system archetypes to themes of dark side thereby stressing how management strategies act as balancing feedback loops to mitigate or prevent dark sides. A qualitative research was conducted by interviewing 21 respondents who play an important role in the world of social entrepreneurship in Belgium. The results show that dark sides of social enterprises manifest itself mostly in the form of trade‐offs and financial, business, and management related issues. Taking over the habits of profit‐oriented companies emerged as a new dark side element. Management strategies include anchoring goals, transparency, obtaining external views, changing the system, and above all reflection. The latter is an important first step to become aware of these issues to be able to change the negative dynamism of these dark sides. (shrink)

In the business ethics literature, the growing interest in social entrepreneurship has remained limited to the assumption that pursuing a social mission will clash against the pursuit of associated economic achievements. This ignores recent developments in the social entrepreneurship literature which show that social missions and economic achievement can also have a mutually constitutive relation. We address this gap adopting the notion of shared value for an ethical inquiry of social entrepreneurship. Using a sensemaking framework, we assume that the emergence (...) of SV propositions can be captured through the analysis of how social entrepreneurs make sense of events of change, selecting the journey of three exemplar cases for an inductive empirical inquiry. From our findings, we propose three themes for further examination. First, the ethical groundings of entrepreneurial SV are mostly shaped by idiosyncratic imperatives that inform both social mission and economic gain from the onset. Second, the ethical groundings of entrepreneurial SV will be likely operationalised as a filtering device, which allows for resilience as well as potentially detrimental blind spots. And third, the ethical groundings of entrepreneurial SV are expressed through ongoing transparency. Whilst there are agendas, these are not necessarily hidden but instead are likely put on show for the scrutiny of markets and communities. We hope that this evidence can add more light to our still modest understanding of the ethical groundings of social entrepreneurship. (shrink)

This paper explores an empirical puzzle, namely, how inter-organizational relationships can be sustained between organizations that draw upon distinctive—and potentially conflicting—institutional logics under conditions of power asymmetry. This research analyses cases of these relationships and suggests some key conditions underlying them. Examining relationships between ‘Fair Trade’ organizations and corporate retailers, a series of contingent factors behind the dynamic persistence of such relationships are proposed, namely: the presence of pre-existing ‘hybrid logics’; the use of boundary-spanning discourses; joint tolerance of conflict; and (...) co-creation of common rules. These four elements are supported by a fifth mediating factor, i.e. the presence and use of a Fair Trade certification system in the collaboration. The latter appears as a central vehicle facilitating cross-logic relationships—it can be seen as a ‘boundary object’ embodying a series of narratives and discourses that are open to multiple interpretations corresponding to the dominant institutional logics of each partner organization. (shrink)

Los valores cristianos son ahora más relevantes debido a que las empresas no se preocupan solo del beneficio. mediante una muestra de 176 empresas de la zona 4 de Ecuador, se ha estudiado la aplicación de los valores de solidaridad, honestidad, humildad y responsabilidad en los procesos productivos y de contratación de personal. El objetivo es averiguar si estos valores son relevantes en la gestión. Como resultado se encontró que existen pocas empresas que tengan en cuenta estos valores declarados como (...) tal. La ausencia de estos valores indica que las empresas deben incorporarlos para tener mayor sostenibilidad y responsabilidad social. (shrink)

Intermediate labour markets provide fixed-term work opportunities and coaching for people in disadvantaged positions in labour markets. We study 46 sequences from six audio-recorded recruitment interviews for an ILM job targetted at people who have been unemployed for a prolonged period. Using an ethnomethodological approach to identity, membership categorisation analysis and conversation analysis, we study how interviewers and candidates construct and negotiate who is fit for the ILM job. We present interactional moves through which the participants jointly construct the ‘fit (...) for the ILM job’ category and treat the candidate’s membership in it as a positive matter. Further, we demonstrate how the candidates are put in an interactionally difficult position in the interview as there are contradictory and ambiguous expectations about the ideal candidate. We discuss the results in relation to the interactional and institutional logics of a recruitment interview and suggest that enhancing the transparency might reinforce ethics of recruitment in ILMs. (shrink)

Base-of-the-pyramid business models aim to achieve profitability and poverty reduction by including poor people into corporate value chains. This goal duality creates tensions. Actors’ responses to these tensions are influenced by their cognitive frames of the phenomena building the tension. Applying a cognitive perspective, I investigate how corporate actors with different frames of poverty respond proactively or defensively to the poverty–profitability tension by adapting business model elements. I find that proactive and defensive responses differ for actors holding different cognitive frames (...) of poverty. The responses have consequences for the poverty impact potential of BOP business models. (shrink)

Social entrepreneurship increasingly involves collective, voluntary organizing efforts where success depends on generating and sustaining members’ participation. To investigate how such participatory social ventures achieve member engagement in pluralistic institutional settings, we conducted a qualitative, inductive study of German Renewable Energy Source Cooperatives. Our findings show how value tensions emerge from differences in RESCoop members’ relative prioritization of community, environmental, and commercial logics, and how cooperative leaders manage these tensions and sustain member participation through temporal, structural, and collaborative compromise strategies. (...) We unpack the mechanisms by which each strategy enables members to justify organizational decisions that violate their personal value priorities and demonstrate their varying implications for organizational growth. Our findings contribute new insights into the challenges of collective social entrepreneurship, the capacity of hybrid organizing strategies to mitigate value concessions, and the importance of logic combinability as a key dimension of pluralistic institutional settings. (shrink)

This paper explores how fair trade social enterprises manage paradoxes in stakeholder-oriented governance models. We use narrative accounts from board members, at governance events and board documents to report an exploratory study of paradoxes in three FTSEs which are partly farmer-owned. Having synthesized the key social enterprise governance literature and framed it alongside the broader paradox theory, we used narratives to explore how tensions are articulated, how they can be applied within an adapted paradox framework, and how governance actors seek (...) to mitigate paradoxes. The paper contributes to current debates in social enterprise scholarship concerning hybridity :455–476, 2010; in Institutional logics in action, Part B, 2012), hybrid organizing :397–441, 2014) and operational tensions :407–442, 2013) by illustrating empirically how the central social/enterprise paradox manifests in FTSEs governance arrangements. We build on the paradox categories proposed by Lüscher and Lewis :221–240, 2008) and adapted in Smith et al. :407–442, 2013) by developing a recursive model of legitimacy-seeking governance processes, conceptualizing how boards seek to mitigate, but not necessarily resolve, paradoxes. (shrink)

Increasing evidence suggests that corporate sustainability is paradoxical in nature, as corporates and managers have to achieve economic, social, and environmental goals, simultaneously. While a paradox perspective has been broadly incorporated into sustainability research for more than a decade, it has resulted in limited improvement in our understanding of corporate sustainability paradox management. In this study, the authors conduct a systematic review of the literature of corporate sustainability paradox management by adopting the Smith–Lewis three-stage model of dynamic equilibrium. The results (...) reveal the following: Both environmental and cognitive factors manifest tensions arising from the sustainability paradox. While both proactive and defensive strategies are adopted to manage the tensions embedded in the corporate sustainability, the proactive strategy is more extensively studied in the current literature. Management strategies of corporate sustainability paradox are characterized as multi-level, multi-stage, and dealing with multiple paradoxes. Proactive strategies enable organizations to enjoy short-term and long-term sustainability benefits. The authors call for further research explicitly addressing the following areas: the paradoxical nature of corporate sustainability management; corporate sustainability paradox management of for-profit organizations; the micro-foundations of corporate sustainability paradox management; defensive strategies and new proactive strategies; and a unified standard of sustainability outcomes. The practical implications of this review are then elaborated. In practice, the results imply that organizations would best manage the corporate sustainability paradox by understanding the paradox and its equilibrium stages. This review and proposed research agenda are expected to deepen interdisciplinary knowledge and set the stage for interested scholars to undertake in their future inquiries. (shrink)

To remain financially viable and continue to accomplish their social missions, nonprofits are increasingly adopting a hybrid organizational form that combines commercial and social welfare logics. While studies recognize that individual organizations vary in how they incorporate and manage hybridity, variation at the level of the organizational form remains poorly understood. Existing studies tend to treat forms as either hybrid or not, limiting our understanding of the different ways a hybrid form may combine multiple logics and how such combinations evolve (...) over time. Analyzing 14 years of data from Canadian nonprofits seeking funding for social enterprise activities, we identify two novel dimensions along which a hybrid form may vary—the locus of integration and the scope of logics. We further find that as the commercial logic became more widespread within the nonprofit sector, variants of the hybrid form shifted from primarily emphasizing the commercial logic to more equally emphasizing both the commercial and social welfare logics and integrating the two logics in multiple ways. Drawing on these findings, we contribute a multi-dimensional conception of hybrid forms and theorize how form-level variation in hybridity can arise from organization-level cognitive challenges that actors face when combining seemingly incompatible logics. We then build on this theorizing to offer an alternative perspective on commercialization of the nonprofit sector as a contextually dependent rather than universal trend. (shrink)

Over the past decade, institutional theory has been extensively utilized in the field of social entrepreneurship (SE). However, an encompassing overview of the wide-ranging applications of institutional theory to SE is lacking, potentially hampering academic advances in this domain. To fill this gap, we conduct a systematic review and supplementary bibliometric analysis of 148 papers published between 2008 and 2022 to comprehensively understand the nexus of SE and institutional theory while also outlining the integration of ethics herein. Our analysis shows (...) that the existing research is divided into three clusters, reflecting three unique conversations between SE and institutional theory: institutional and societal change through SE, institutional complexity and hybrid organizations, and the institutional context of SE. We find that ethics is only integrated into these conversations to a limited degree. Based on our analysis, we zoom in on each conversation to identify the existing research gaps and point to new opportunities for future research. We also encourage SE scholars to zoom out on the abovementioned conversations to enrich this promising field by critically examining ethics and incorporating relevant insights from other research fields (i.e., social movement theory, category, and emotions). (shrink)

Social enterprises are hybrid organizations that primarily pursue social missions while also seeking economic gains. Drawing on workplace diversity and conflict theories, this article addresses recent calls for further research to explore how employees within social enterprises experience internal conflicts arising from the organizational pursuit of dual, competing missions (i.e., social and economic), and how social enterprises manage, and potentially overcome, these challenges. In the context of Korean social enterprise, we conducted a quantitative study that built on an initial explorative (...) qualitative study. Our research examined whether perceived participatory human resource management practices and diversity climate increase employees’ affective commitment by reducing their relational conflict. We further explored a boundary condition, perceived social impact, which strengthened this mediation relationship. Our results offer significant insights into social enterprise, business ethics, and broader management literature. Implications for future research and practice are also discussed. (shrink)

The primary aim of this study is to clarify the authorship trends, collaboration patterns, and impact factors in business ethics literature by looking at articles published between 1960 and 2015 in four leading business ethics journals: Business and Society, Business Ethics: A European Review, Business Ethics Quarterly, and the Journal of Business Ethics. This study showed the growth type of business ethics literature, authorship trends, collaboration patterns, authors' productivity evolved by subperiods and journals, and authors' dominance factor by subperiods and (...) journals. After providing an evaluation of the results of the study, the authors discuss the study's limitations and suggestions for future research. (shrink)

Stockholder and stakeholder perspectives have been positioned in the literature as being in tension, and thus a potential source of innovation and change. However, researchers have overlooked a systematic examination of this presumption in theory and in practice. This study explores the ways that stockholder and stakeholder assumptions are presented by theorists and compares these with expressions of stockholder and stakeholder perspectives used by firms in practice. We argue that theoretical entrenchment dichotomizing these perspectives has disrupted the ability of researchers (...) to leverage this tension. While scholarship remains trapped in a vicious cycle, we also argue that firms in practice express only the acceptance dimension of a virtuous cycle. Our empirical research demonstrates that firms accept and accommodate the paradoxical tension between managing for stockholders versus balancing the interests of stakeholders. This is evidenced by strategies we identify as book‐ending, cadence, continuous and simultaneous co‐mingling, and hybridization. We find that in practice these tensions are more integrated whereas in theory they are treated as more distinct and, often, in conflict. We suggest ways in which both scholarship and practice can better leverage tension as paradoxical opportunity. (shrink)

This article maps existing research from 5,874 scholarly publications on social entrepreneurship (SE) utilizing scientometrics. The mapping indicates a taxonomy of five clusters: (a) the nature of SE, (b) policy implications and employment in relation to SE, (c) SE in communities and health, (d) SE personality traits, and (e) SE education. We complement the scientometric analysis with a systematic literature review of publications on SE in the Financial Times 50 list (FT50) and Business & Society and propose a multistage, multilevel (...) framework that highlights the clusters of existing research on SE based on their stage and level of analysis. This review study also helps outline a set of future research directions, including studies examining (a) the process stage at the micro-level and macro-level, (b) linkages across levels and stages, (c) linkages across stages over time or longitudinal studies, (d) SE in resource-constrained environments, (e) technological advancement and its impact on SE, (f) the types of social enterprises and their outcomes, and (g) various emerging topics in SE. (shrink)

The corporate social responsibility and industrial relations studies have evolved mostly in parallel. In this paper, we integrate the IR with the CSR perspective, highlighting their similarities and differences. In particular, the study adopts a framework which includes a wide set of CSR-related issues to explore what unions and companies negotiate under the umbrella of CSR. It analyses and compares the national sectoral agreements of two key industries in the Italian economy, i.e. Metal and Chemical. We find that these two (...) sectors exhibit differences because the CSR-related issues covered by the two contracts are formally labelled as CSR in the Chemical contract, and not labelled as CSR in the Metal contract. We also find similarities regarding the CSR-related issues covered and not covered by the national contracts, and the binding processes centrally negotiated for their implementation. We interpret the similarities in light of the specificities of the Italian IR system, and the differences in light of the negotiation traditions of the two sectors under study, which induce the actors in the Metal sector to focus more on what differentiates the CSR and IR perspectives, and the actors in the Chemical sector to focus more on what the CSR and IR perspectives share. (shrink)

This study contributes to the growing interest in how hybrid organizations manage paradoxical social–business tensions. Our empirical case is “impact sourcing”—hybrids in global supply chains that hire staff from disadvantaged communities to provide services to business clients. We identify two major growth orientations—“community-focused” and “client-focused” growth—their inherent tensions and ways that hybrids manage them. The former favors slow growth and manages tensions through highly integrated client and community relations; the latter promotes faster growth and manages client and community relations separately. (...) Both growth orientations address social–business tensions in particular ways, but also create latent constraints that manifest when entrepreneurial aspirations conflict with the current growth path. In presenting and discussing our findings, we introduce preempting management practices of tensions, and the importance of geographic embeddedness and distance to the paradox literature. (shrink)

Prior work shows limited success in retail firms’ efforts to create socially responsible supply chains by enforcing suppliers’ compliance with labor standards, partly due to conflicting sourcing demands exerted on the supplier by siloed functional units within the retail firm. To ensure the substantive adoption of labor standards throughout its supply chain, we argue that the retail firm must improve their degree of “supply chain labor compliance integration” by minimizing cross-functional tensions in human capital, identities, processes and goals. We define (...) supply chain labor compliance integration, identify its determinant organizational practices that reduce cross-functional tensions, and explain the mechanisms by which it improves the retail firm’s supply chain labor standards performance. This work offers theoretical and practical insights on the retail firm’s capacity for managing socially responsible supply chains, and more broadly, on how systematically minimizing intra-organizational tensions arising in the pursuit of competing organizational priorities is a prerequisite for their simultaneous execution in inter-organizational business exchanges. (shrink)

This study examines how the leading beverage company handles the strategic paradox between its core business and the social issue of obesity. A discursive analysis reveals how the organization does embrace a social goal related to obesity but not the paradoxical tension between this goal and its core business. The analysis further shows how the tension, along with the responsibility for the social goal, is projected outside the organization. This response is underpinned by the paradoxical constructions of consumers and the (...) concept of obesity in the organization’s communication. Based on these findings, I outline a new type of process for projection, one of the defensive mechanisms recognized in the literature. The findings increase our understanding of defensive responses to organizational paradoxes and help distinguish between different kinds of strategic paradoxes. They also highlight the need to further open up the complexity and multiplicity of strategic paradoxes related to corporate sustainability. (shrink)

The last decade has witnessed the emergence of a paradox perspective on corporate sustainability. By explicitly acknowledging tensions between different desirable, yet interdependent and conflicting sustainability objectives, a paradox perspective enables decision makers to achieve competing sustainability objectives simultaneously and creates leeway for superior business contributions to sustainable development. In stark contrast to the business case logic, a paradox perspective does not establish emphasize business considerations over concerns for environmental protection and social well-being at the societal level. In order to (...) contribute to the consolidation of this emergent field of research, we offer a definition of the paradox perspective on corporate sustainability and a framework to delineate its descriptive, instrumental, and normative aspects. This framework clarifies the paradox perspective’s contents and its implications for research and practice. We use the framework to map the contributions to this thematic symposium on paradoxes in sustainability and to propose questions for future research. (shrink)

In this paper, we employ bibliometric analysis to empirically analyse the research on social entrepreneurship published between 1996 and 2017. By employing methods of citation analysis, document co-citation analysis, and social network analysis, we analyse 1296 papers containing 74,237 cited references and uncover the structure, or intellectual base, of research on social entrepreneurship. We identify nine distinct clusters of social entrepreneurship research that depict the intellectual structure of the field. The results provide an overall perspective of the social entrepreneurship field, (...) identifying its influential works and analysing scholarly communication between these works. The results further aid in clarifying the overall centrality features of the social entrepreneurship research network. We also examine the integration of ethics into social entrepreneurship literature. We conclude with a discussion on the structure and evolution of the social entrepreneurship field. (shrink)

Smith defines the business enterprise primarily as the endeavor of an individual who remains fully embedded in the broader society and subject to its moral demands. For him, the conceptions of the local community and its normative framework, of the enterprise, and of the individuals within it need to be aligned with each other and developed together. Over time, four processes have, however, led to a widening gap between the business world and the local community. These are the dissemination of (...) the corporate model, the transformation of the entrepreneurial role toward an agency role, changes in the ownership structure, and changes in the relation to the local community. This article presents Smith’s integrative conception of business and its contributions to the development of integrative theories of organizations and of business–society relations in the twenty-first century. Among others, it discusses the necessity to develop a normative-relational dimension of organizations that addresses the relations between the organization, its members, and the normative framework of the local community. This integrative approach of business–society relations challenges current business ethics research which often suggests that solutions to the current scandals lie either within the framework, the organization, or the individuals. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between stakeholder management and international diversification. We differentiate between strengths and concerns in stakeholder management to demonstrate the differential effects of the two aspects of stakeholder management. Previous research on stakeholder theory often focuses on the importance of stakeholder relations, trying to build a business case of relational capital that results from strong stakeholder management. Such a relational approach, however, overlooks the process of managing stakeholders, a process that allows firms with strengths in stakeholder management (...) to develop an important capability of managing tensions. In this study, we argue that this capability, an inherent part of stakeholder management, can be critical when firms face increased complexity during the process of international diversification. We therefore propose that strengths in stakeholder management are positively related to international diversification, while concerns in stakeholder management are negatively related to international diversification. Using panel data for 169 US multinational firms over a 10‐year period, we find support that strengths in stakeholder management facilitate international diversification. We discuss the contributions of our findings to stakeholder theory and international business research. (shrink)

Work Integration Social Enterprises (WISE) are a means of redressing injustices that People With Mental Illness and/or Intellectual Disability (PWMI/ID) face in the labor market. As the field’s understanding of WISE improves, many have argued for the need to study their underlying philosophies and ethical foundations. We present a case study of a WISE for PWMI/ID that responds to a humanistic-personalist framework. This framework is based on the consideration of several features of the person: their wholeness, uniqueness, intrinsic dignity, innate (...) rights, and capacity for permanent development. Under this perspective, human work entails dignity because it is a potential source of meaning and personal growth. The humanistic-personalist framework is more comprehensive than other approaches presented in the literature, based on justice and human rights or care ethics, thereby advancing our knowledge of how WISE may provide economically viable and meaningful work experiences to underserved communities. Drawing from this humanistic-personalist perspective, we provide six criteria that can serve as a normative framework for organizations, particularly WISE for PWMI/ID. The case study focuses on La Fageda, a 40-year-old Spanish WISE that has achieved significant social and economic success. La Fageda is based on a sound understanding of the human person. From its foundations and practices, three pillars are identified: the rehabilitating power of work, the practice of designing individual itineraries, and the pursuit of economic success as a means to social success, which is the project’s mission. (shrink)

This study draws on institutional theory to provide insights into how new forms of organizations gain legitimacy under institutional voids. Based on interviews with leaders of 42 Chinese social enterprises (SEs), we find that dominant stakeholders—the state—are ambivalent about new ventures’ agendas and practices, which is displayed in their being sometimes supportive and other times skeptical, even hostile. SEs favor the contingent engagement political strategy to develop mutually beneficial relationships with the state while keeping a healthy distance. This enables them (...) to gain sociopolitical legitimacy in a nonthreatening and acceptable way for survival and growth. The findings further highlighted the individual, organizational, and environmental factors that condition SE legitimation approaches, including the form of state control, leaders’ political capital, organizational social mission, and regional political environment. This study makes theoretical contributions to the institutional and SE literatures, highlighting stakeholder ambivalence as an essential characteristic of an institutional context fraught with institutional voids. (shrink)

Process models are valuable conceptual tools to help in understanding the approaches to value creation in social enterprises. This teaching case illustrates the application of a process model about creating, building, and sustaining a social enterprise with a mission to provide clean water to communities in need. The social enterprise generates revenue in support of community water projects and works with community stakeholders in different locations throughout the world to provide sustainable clean water solutions. The case study uses primary data (...) from semi-structured interviews, direct observations of a community project, and archival sources to demonstrate application of the process model. The study shows how the social enterprise developed as a promising idea; was implemented through an operating model with resources to support social impact; and continues to build and evolve while guided by the social mission. The paper concludes with a discussion and teaching note on ways to use the case for educational purposes to enhance learning about the social value creation process. (shrink)

Within this paper, we adopt a qualitative process approach to explore how ethical judgments are influenced by spatio-cultural meanings applied to social entrepreneurship in the context of Mozambique. We analyse how such ethical judgments emerged using data gathered over a 4 year period in Maputo. Our findings illustrate three modes used to inform ethical judgments: embracing, rejecting and integrating. These describe how ethical judgments transpire as participants evaluate social entrepreneurship drawing upon related global normative meanings and those embedded within the (...) local context. This analysis offers a critical contribution regarding how ethical judgments regarding social entrepreneurship evolve from negotiation and interaction within a context of multiple spatio-cultural meanings. (shrink)

This paper investigates the difficulties of creating economic, social, and environmental values when operating as a hybrid venture. Drawing on hybrid organizing and sustainable business model research, it explores the implications of alternative forms of business model experimented with by farmer owned, fairtrade social enterprise Cafédirect. Responding to changes and challenges in the market and societal environment, Cafédirect has tried multiple business model innovations to deliver on all three forms of value capture, with differing levels of success. This longitudinal case (...) study, therefore, provides a contribution to our understanding of how business models enact hybrid mission, providing a platform for triple-bottom-line value capture. In doing so, we are able to expand on the normative understandings of integrating hybrid objectives, and the complications of multiple types of value capture. (shrink)

Codes of governance have mushroomed in contexts operating under a single, dominant institutional logic, such as publicly listed corporations. These codes act as institutional prescriptions that help spread best practices throughout industries. More recently, in some countries, specific codes have been developed for hybrid organizations that integrate multiple, conflicting institutional logics simultaneously, such as cooperative enterprises. Drawing on an extensive set of qualitative data, we ask how such institutional prescriptions may (fail to) address governance challenges in organizations with multiple, conflicting (...) institutional demands. In doing so, we extend current literature on governance of hybrid organizations, which has so far focused on individual and organizational levels, to include institutional-level strategies. While governance codes are often inspired by deontological ethics to solve issues in a single institutional logic, we find that governance codes for hybrid organizations should not prioritize a single institutional logic, nor follow a deontological approach to improving governance, but should, on a more pragmatist take, remain open to continuous learning. (shrink)