Managing Social-Business Tensions: A Review and Research Agenda for Social Enterprise

In a world filled with poverty, environmental degradation, and moral injustice, social enterprises offer a ray of hope. These organizations seek to achieve social missions through business ventures. Yet social missions and business ventures are associated with divergent goals, values, norms, and identities. Attending to them simultaneously creates tensions, competing demands, and ethical dilemmas. Effectively understanding social enterprises therefore depends on insight into the nature and management of these tensions. While existing research recognizes tensions between social missions and business ventures, we lack any systematic analysis. Our paper addresses this issue. We first categorize the types of tensions that arise between social missions and business ventures, emphasizing their prevalence and variety. We then explore how four different organizational theories offer insight into these tensions, and we develop an agenda for future research. We end by arguing that a focus on social-business tensions not only expands insight into social enterprises, but also provides an opportunity for research on social enterprises to inform traditional organizational theories. Taken together, our analysis of tensions in social enterprises integrates and seeks to energize research on this expanding phenomenon.

Toward a comprehensive conceptualization of business organizations and their members from a sensemaking perspective. Lessons learned from Picassoâeuro?s cubism

Until recently, much of the discussion regarding the type of organization theory needed in management studies focused on normative vs. descriptive roles of management science. Some authors however noticed that even a descriptive theory can have a normative impact. Among others, management theories are used by practitioners to make sense of their identity and roles in given contexts, and so guide their attitude, decision process, and behavior. The sensemaking potential of a theory might in this view represent an important element for predicting the adoption of a theory by practitioners. Accordingly, theories are needed which better grasp the increased complexity of today's business environment in order to be more relevant for practitioners. This article proposes a multi-faceted perspective of organizations. This implies leaving a simplistic view of organizations and building a 'cubist' conception. Picasso's cubism paintings are characterized by the use of multiple perspectives within a single drawing. Similarly, I argue here that managers must learn not only to add multiple responsibilities in their work, but to develop an integrated conception of their managerial identity and of their organizations in which the multiple social and economic dimensions are enmeshed. Social entrepreneurship is discussed as illustration of typical multi-faceted business.

The double-edged sword of social capital: Three essays on entrepreneurship in developing nations

ABSTRACT My study seeks to answer the main question: "how does entrepreneurs' social capital positively and negatively affect their resource mobilization efforts, and exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunity?" To answer this question, I develop a model for examining positive and negative effects of social capital on resource accumulation by entrepreneurs, and the subsequent effect of resource accumulation on the exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunity, and utilize data from Africa to ëmpirically test the relationships in this model. Developing nations are a suitable context because: a) They require entrepreneurship for economic development, b) They have received less attention in management and entrepreneurship research, c) Because of inadequately-developed institutions, entrepreneurs from developing nations face major resource mobilization challenges hence they often turn to their social ties for resources, and d) The communalistic and collectivistic nature of most developing nations -encouraging support and sharing of resources- may help us better understand how society's values and structures may contribute and also deduct firm resources. My study reveals that social capital contributes resources to entrepreneurs in developing nations at a cost that takes away resources, and that more resources but lower costs facilitate entrepreneurial opportunity exploitation. For entrepreneurs in developing nations, large networks, greater shared identity, and more trust are beneficial. To increase chances of raising more resources, entrepreneurs from communalistic societies should include network members from outside their communities. Besides providing financial support, policy-makers should develop training programs and advisory services on configuration of entrepreneurs' networks so as to achieve more resources at a low cost. My study insights can help improve entrepreneurs' resource accumulation efforts and the subsequent growth of their firms, leading to the overall economic growth of developing nations.