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This commentary reflects on the social franchising model of Unjani. It discusses the intricate interwoven elements of the model which allows it to flourish. Here, I take a stewardship and social capital view to elaborate on these mechanisms. In the second part of the commentary, I highlight the limitations of the model specifically as it pertains to its potential growth.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play an important role for growth and sustainable development, particularly for rural areas in which MNCs are absent. Despite this link, there is little sy...

This conceptual article extends the literature on the disadvantages of calling. The article makes four main contributions. First, it argues that some of the burden of calling is shouldered not by called individuals or their employers, but rather by close family members. Second, it argues that calling influences work–life ideology, limiting a called person’s ability to exercise choice and self-manage their work–life boundary. Third, it introduces the novel notion of the sacrifice-reliant organisation, which relies on calling to achieve organisational goals. Fourth, the article argues normatively that organisations with called members have an enhanced duty of care towards families of its members that is commensurate with the extent to which they rely on calling to achieve their goals. Using ethics of care, it also develops guidelines on the extent and components of such an enhanced duty of care.

Amid calls for business and management schools to engage with the ‘grand challenges’ of sustainability, this empirical research paper asks how do early-career researchers cultivate interdisciplinar...

We explore how nonprofits can effectively govern delegation relationships. We extend stewardship theory by conceptualizing stewardship costs—costs in delegation relationships based on stewardship behavior. As stewards are theorized as other-regarding, self-actualizing, and intrinsically motivated, so far, literature almost exclusively points to the positive performance potential of stewardship behavior. Addressing this shortcoming, we develop propositions showing how stewardship selection costs rooted in the psychological characteristics of stewardship behavior and stewardship management costs rooted in situational factors of stewardship behavior occur during relationship formation and maintenance, and how they counteract the potential to increase performance. We identify and systematize opportunity costs of delayed growth, limited growth potential, and lost standardization gains, as well as increased selection and management costs. To demonstrate the theoretical potential and empirical relevance of our framework, we illustrate our arguments by referring to social franchising, a scaling strategy considered relevant for nonprofits as well as social enterprises.

This symposium explores the interface between organizations and marginalized persons by examining the role that organizations may have in reintegrating these individuals into work and society at la...

Despite increasing attention to corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues in global value chains (Gond & Moon, 2011), the complicity of multinational corporations in perpetuating global inequiti...

This All Academy Symposium endeavors to broaden the sight of management research by highlighting the central nature of embodiment and embodied experience to understanding human interactions. We use...

As forms of private self-regulation, multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) have emerged as an important empirical phenomenon in global governance processes. At the same time, MSIs are also theoretically intriguing because of their inherent double nature. On the one hand, MSIs spell out CSR standards that define norms for corporate behavior. On the other hand, MSIs are also the result of corporate and stakeholder behavior. We combine the perspectives of institutional theory and club theory to conceptualize this double nature of MSIs. Based on a stage model that looks at the interplay of actor and institutional dynamics, we generate insights into why actors join a voluntary MSI, how the various motivations and intentions of the actors influence the standard development, and how these as well as the MSI design are subsequently influenced by both external (institutional) and internal (club) dynamics.

This article develops a Hayekian perspective on social franchising that distinguishes between the end-connected logic of the small group and the rule-connected logic of the big group. Our key claim is that mission-driven social entrepreneurs often draw on the small-group logic when starting their social ventures and then face difficulties when the process of scaling shifts their operations toward a big-group logic. In this situation, social franchising offers a strategy to replicate the small group despite systemwide scaling, to mobilize decentrally accessible social capital, and to reduce agency costs through mechanisms of self-selection and self-monitoring. By employing a Hayekian perspective, we are thus able to offer an explanation as to why social franchising is a suitable scaling strategy for some social entrepreneurship organizations and not for others. We illustrate our work using the Ashoka Fellow Wellcome.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to identify the role intermediaries can play in an small to medium‐sized enterprise's (SME's) pursuit for corporate sustainability with a focus on eco‐innovation. The research identifies drivers and barriers for eco‐innovation, and highlights effects induced through collaboration between SMEs and local authorities, on the one hand, and consultancies, on the other.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is based on an exploratory qualitative interview study among German SMEs of the metal and mechanical engineering industry that have participated in “Ecoprofit”, an intermediary based program that aims at introducing organizations to the concept of sustainable development through implementation of eco‐innovations.FindingsThe key findings are that first, the proactive approach by a public intermediary (here local authority) is one essential push factor to trigger eco‐innovations in SMEs with low absorptive capacity. Second, it is found that SMEs may need facilitation for eco‐innovation from different types of intermediaries (public and private) with different levels of support, which can range from customized and individual to more loosely held support, such as networks.Originality/valueThis study discusses the challenges of corporate sustainability with a focus on eco‐innovations for SMEs and proposes a “complex intermediary” consisting of a local authority and consultancies as one means to engage SMEs in sustainability. Moreover, it focuses on SMEs in the B2B context, organizations that are often overlooked despite their vast impact. Furthermore, by using a single industry approach, in‐depth findings for the metal and mechanical engineering industry are presented.

„Social Entrepreneurship“ erlebt seit Jahren einen Aufmerksamkeitsboom. Organisationen wie Ashoka fordern offentlichkeitswirksam herausragende Social Entrepreneure. Auf Konferenzen wie dem VisionSummit treffen sich jahrlich Tausende, um sich (u.a) uber soziales Unternehmertum auszutauschen. Neu-eingerichtete Professuren, neue Lehrangebote und neu-gegrundete Fachzeitschriften wie das Journal of Social Entrepreneurship greifen das Thema in der Wissenschaft auf.

An organization employs individuals and it is widely accepted that those individuals are stakeholders of the employing organization. Employees’ families are not usually considered to be amongst the...

Social business and social entrepreneurship offer an exciting field for empirical and conceptual management research. Yet, while there are many attempts to define either social entrepreneurship or social business, the boundaries and overlaps of both phenomena often remain vague or contested – thus rendering empirical or conceptual learning more difficult. We propose a three-dimensional definitional framework to define social business and social entrepreneurship, distinguish them, and relate them to each other. Our framework interprets the pure forms of both social business and social entrepreneurship as the two-dimensional combination of a pure social mission with either pure financial self-sustainability (social business) or a pure innovation focus (social entrepreneurship). Since the finance and innovation perspective are distinct yet independent dimensions, we derive and illustrate four cases of how social business and social entrepreneurship may but need not overlap. Challenging the assumption that each dimension is confined to two dichotomous values, we then interpret each dimension as a full spectrum and introduce the idea of mission, finance, and innovation hybridity. Our discussion suggests that multidimensional hybridity is the empirical rule rather than the exception. It is for this reason that the study of the pure forms of social business and social entrepreneurship promises particularly fruitful insights for management research. We conclude with implications for future management research.

Today humankind faces persistent ecological and social challenges that no single organization or individual can solve. Social entrepreneurship provides an innovative management perspective for addressing these problems by seeing them as an entrepreneurial opportunity. In order to emphasize the underlying mechanisms of how social entrepreneurs „do business“ we use the concept of business models as a generic framework. This concept helps to explain how social entrepreneurs creatively combine preexistent resources (e.g. financial, physical, human) in innovative ways and how value —financial and social —is created. We identify three social entrepreneurship business models - the „freemium“, the „catalyst“, and the „expertise broker“ model. We use three real-life examples to illustrate how social entrepreneurs have a distinct access to resources and integrate them innovatively in the configuration of their value proposition, value architecture, and revenue model.

This article documents the results of a research workshop bringing together six perspectives on social entrepreneurship. The idea was to challenge existing concepts of the economy, the firm, and entrepreneurship in order to shed new light on social entrepreneurship and on our existing theoretical frameworks. The first two contributions use a macro-perspective and discuss the notion of adaptive societies and the tragedies of disharmonization, respectively. Taking a management perspective, the next two focus on the limits of conventional assumptions in management theory, particularly human capital theory and resource-based view. The final two contributions follow an entrepreneurship perspective highlighting the usefulness of mobilization theory and the business model lens to social entrepreneurship. Despite this diversity, all contributions share the fact that they challenge narrow definitions of the unit of analysis in social entrepreneurship; they illustrate the aspect of social embeddedness, and they argue for an open-but-disciplined diversity of theories in social entrepreneurship research.

Corporate Sustainability (CS) links environmental and social issues to the corporate level by integration into conventional management. Thereby, companies can achieve sustainable organizational development and contribute to the sustainable development of society. One criterion of CS, among others, is eco-efficiency which aims to achieve environmental and economic excellence. By combining environmental issues with economic performance, aiming for eco-efficiency can be a practical starting point for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) reorienting their conventional management with small, not too radical steps. Considering the peculiarities of SMEs and inherent resource constraints, collaboration with intermediary organizations can promote this process. Through such collaboration SMEs have access to comprehensive and external expertise, can solve problems at the business level, establish new forms of partnerships and engage in learning networks. To identify the role of intermediary organizations in the process of aiming for eco-efficiency, this study chose a qualitative exploratory research using the multi-case study approach. Thereby drivers, barriers and matters related to adopting eco-efficiency through collaboration were identifiable. Owners and managers of SMEs operating in the metal- and mechanical engineering industries in Germany were interviewed. These companies took part in the ECOPROFIT®-scheme Germany, a partnership model between public and private organizations aiming to improve eco-efficiency. In this model local authorities act as intermediary organizations in terms of facilitating change and mediating between partners. The findings of this study suggest that eco-efficiency may be a suitable first step for SMEs to move towards CS as it presents a win-win situation. The role of intermediary organizations as initiators and facilitators to overcome challenges and barriers specific to SMEs is also indicated by the presented study.

This paper raises three research questions: what are the empirically held success criteria and how do they differ among social and commercial entrepreneurs? How are these different criteria associa...

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) scholarship has recently taken a “political turn” in its study of how firms are increasingly involved in providing public goods and shaping business regulation...