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The COVID-19 pandemic has caused an unprecedented social and economic crisis, not least for hybrid organisations, as they must manage the tension arising from their dual mission to create social and economic value. Building on a theoretical framework for hybrid tension, our work contextualises how tensions emerge and are managed in hybrid organisations when they are exposed to exogenous shocks. We address the following research question. How have hybrid organisations managed the tensions arising from their dual purpose during the COVID-19 crisis? Our focus is on Italian benefit corporations, which are organisations combining social and economic objectives. We conduct two focus groups with 12 Italian benefit corporations. Our findings show the emergence of four constructs that capture the responses to the COVID-19 crisis: social and/or commercial orientation; technological characterisation; internal and external stakeholder relationship; openness to changes. We explain the relationship of these constructs via a framework of performing, organising, learning, and belonging tensions.

Neoliberalisation of welfare has stimulated growth of hybrid organizational forms – including social enterprises – that bridge welfare objectives and market models of service provision. However, th...

Despite the growing social entrepreneurship (SE) literature in other disciplines, the research on tourism social entrepreneurship (TSE) is still in its infancy, and the knowledge has not been expli...

Social entrepreneurship has been popularised as a market-based activity with an embedded social purpose aimed at positively transforming communities and society. As a strategy for developing sustai...

This paper considers the extent to which social enterprise practitioners’ outlook on the capacity of social enterprises to transform inequitable socio-economic systems conforms to compensatory or t...

In this article, I investigate how social enterprises identify the talents of groups of disabled people and match them to a market demand. Through the study of a blind massage enterprise in Nepal, ...

This paper considers resource coordination in production systems featuring the presence of enterprises and organizations pursuing social, health-related, educational, cultural, and environmental aims, or social enterprises (SEs). The resource coordination problem is one of allocating and distributing resources towards these aims. By their very nature, these goals are very close to the Polanyian idea of the primacy of society over the self-regulating market. We ask what the specificities of organisations that pursue social aims are, and what coordination mechanisms underpin their production. The premise is that individuals are driven by plural motivations, including pro-social motivations besides self-interested ones, thus requiring a plurality of coordination mechanisms. The paper suggests that SEs make principal use of cooperative pacts based on norms of reciprocity, but include also market and state-led coordination, both at organisational and systemic levels. We consider specific institutional solutions in support of cooperation and reciprocity. These are: combined rules on profit and asset distribution, surplus accumulation and redistribution, and multi-stakeholding.

This paper brings together the fields of social entrepreneurship and social networks by using the social network analysis approach to map the evolution of the network of a social enterprise in Indi...

The growth of research studies on social enterprise over the past ten years has been on a steep positive trend. Social enterprise is commonly defined as the organizational pursuit of blending socia...

Non-profit social enterprises address social problems with business models. This paper examines the founding years of an early non-profit social enterprise in the United States to highlight the rol...

This study examined the impact of publicness on public value creation in social enterprises from the perspective of integrative publicness. Our findings show that internal control is positively ass...

This paper is derived from a study of the mission statements of a sample of 100 United Kingdom social enterprises. The purpose of the research was to reveal what insight such organisational artefac...

Based on interviews with key stakeholder groups of social enterprises in Hungary, democratic practices in decision making were seen as important features of social enterprises. However, there were ...

This study conducts a comparative analysis of social enterprise intermediaries in China and India to better understand how they legitimize social enterprises in new settings. To address theoretical...

As more non-profits embrace social enterprise, it is important to examine the role social enterprise plays in society. Market failure is the prevailing economic theory explaining non-profits’ exist...

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are considered worthy successors of the Millennium Development Goals. Generally accepted as one of the foremost priorities for most nations, the effort is t...

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a dozen small towns in rural South Australia began a unique social experiment: they imported an alcohol control model from Sweden designed to curb drunken...

This paper aims to advance our knowledge of the relationship between social enterprise and local government. As social enterprise lies at the crossroads of government, market, and civil society, dy...

The purpose of this article is to offer a synopsis of the progression in scholarly research in social business enterprises (SBE). The study entails bibliometric analysis, and bibliographic data vis...

In China, the development of social enterprises based on Western concepts marked the entrance of an institutional innovation with strong institutional forces working against its survival. This stud...

Social entrepreneurship (SE) is acknowledged as a valuable tool for tackling social problems. Whereas SE intention (SEI) is considered an important prerequisite for founding a social enterprise, em...

In this Special Issue, we hope to reframe the conversation about context and bring back context to the front and centre of our way of knowing and theorizing in the field of social entrepreneurship....

Small enterprises play a vital role in the drive toward sustainable tourism and in the sector more broadly, and their importance is accentuated in rural contexts. Beyond entrepreneurial spirit, wha...

For social enterprise to matter to racialized people, it must be purposefully embedded in the community. This study examines three nonprofit organizations led by women engaged in community economic...

Indigenous benefits management structures (BMSs) manage and distribute assets arising from land-use agreements. Land-use agreements between Indigenous groups and resource proponents seek to achieve...

Definitions of social enterprise and hybrid organizations are compatible and allow application to a variety of organizational forms. We analyse the not-for-profit enterprise formed specifically to ...

This article discusses China’s most recent social enterprise-related laws and policies in a systematic fashion. It first introduces the concept of social enterprise under the Chinese context. Then ...

Acknowledgments: The iHARP database was funded by unrestricted grants from Mundipharma International Limited and Optimum Patient Care Global Ltd, which is a social enterprise that focuses on quality improvement in clinical practice. The sponsor was not involved in data analysis or the interpretation of the results.

Despite the burgeoning research on social entrepreneurship in recent years, there is limited research on youths as a context for theorizing. This article examines the influence of social entreprene...

Social enterprises (SEs) have often been regarded as a solution for improving the situations of vulnerable social groups such as women, the Roma and people with disabilities. However, how SEs in pr...

The perspective of people with dementia, particularly late-stage dementia, is often excluded from research, even from methods like Participatory Action Research (PAR), which aim to democratise rese...

This article adds to the literature on social enterprise by drawing on the strategy-as-practice tradition of strategy research. There, strategy is seen as something an organization does, not as som...

The aggregation of people and information on the Internet has caused individual journalists to forge self-employed and self-branded social entrepreneur careers, an endeavour that combines commercia...

This paper distinguishes two levels of system elements that accommodate social entrepreneurs’ strategic role in driving systemic change while also recognizing their limitation of doing so. Relying ...

This essay offers conceptual development for thinking diverse economies in terms of their relationship to antagonism. Rather than seeing antagonism as unhelpfully fueling capitalocentric thinking, the essay argues that antagonism can usefully recognize and engage with problematic forms of power and domination. Building on calls for a closer engagement of community-economies thinking with wider anticapitalist praxis, the essay explores how social and solidarity economy (SSE) practices sometimes reproduce, sometimes challenge, and sometimes build alternatives to forms of power that attempt to shape, obstruct, and obliterate attempts to create better worlds. The essay develops conceptualizations of social enterprise, the social economy, and solidarity economies before offering the novel concept of the antagonistic economy, arguably a site from which angry opposition to constraining power relations can generate a more productive politics of possibility. The conception of the antagonistic economy is developed by discussion of taking back labor through recovered factories and land through community land trusts.

How social entrepreneurship can become social innovation has been little studied, even less in the rural context. This document poses that social entrepreneurship generate different types of capita...

Utilizing a choice-based conjoint survey of donors from four nonprofit organizations, this study investigated individual donation intentions and their organizational and venture attribute preferenc...

The question of the potential for alternative corporate forms in Africa is a significant one. Alongside the dominant current which argues that the traditional corporation is the way forward for eco...

This paper examines how 15 London social enterprise nurseries undertook a short pilot study to ascertain how to successfully replace a formal reading scheme with the Whitehurst and Lonigan dialogic...

Social entrepreneurship (SE) has become a global phenomenon that is increasingly receiving institutional support as a business model designed to address social problems. However, despite having a g...

Corporate organisational constructs facilitating social enterprise have proliferated for the last decade across Europe. This article investigates this phenomenon, and provides an initial analytical...

Irrefutably, many countries of the developing world continue to exhibit economic investments culture primarily premised on maximizing profit and accumulating wealth for oneself. Through this phenom...

Research and practice demonstrate that Housing First (HF) more effectively ends homelessness for persons struggling with mental illness than traditional approaches. Less understood is how HF streng...

This study aims to examine the determinants of customers’ intention to purchase social enterprise products. The data were collected using a self-administrated questionnaire consisting of 360 respon...

This article investigates how social enterprises providing waste collection and recycling services overcame start-up challenges and sustain their operations. Based on analysis of five cases in Tanz...

Social Enterprises (SEs) have gained a considerable amount of attention during last decade in entrepreneurship sector. This paper aims to investigate the benefits and challenges associated with the use of online communities (OCs) by actors in SE sector for value co-creation. Nine semi-structured interviews were conducted with actors derived primarily from 4 Facebook OCs dedicated for SEs. Results demonstrate that the benefits of using OCs include increased accessibility, time and cost effectiveness, increased responsiveness, accessing to a network of connections, and resource exchange opportunities. However, the challenges include time-consuming, budget, lack of capacity, inadequate moderation, fragmentation of efforts, and inactivity.

This study advances the entrepreneurial orientation and knowledge creation literature by investigating the ways opportunities, motivations, and abilities to knowledge exchange and knowledge creatio...