Search

Grand challenges are evaluative, uncertain, and volatile. Robust action strategies of multivocality, participation, and experimentation have been promoted as effective conceptual and practical responses to address these features. However, robust actions suffer from limitations, for example: when many actors have their say, but some actors assume sovereignty of interpretation and shape goals according to their own needs; when stakeholders participate, but fail to mobilize action; or when, despite distributed experimentation, involved actors deviate from joint progress when they face adversity. We propose theory on hybrid organizing, typically situated in reference to small-scale organizations such as social enterprises, has much to offer to meet these limitations in addressing grand challenges. We first conceptualize a grand challenges grid that helps explain the complexity of grand challenges better. We then develop a theoretical model of hybrid organizing for grand challenges, which proposes six ways in which hybrid organizing can amplify robust actions and thereby meet the complexity of grand challenges more effectively. We combine the two fields of research in new ways and thereby promote theoretical advancements in each of them, and specifically at their intersection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing demands from policy and the public urge firms to become more sustainable. Many businesses are reshaping their internal sustainability practices and are changing how they communicate their position on sustainability to external stakeholders. However, there are different combinations between the internal practices and the external communication of sustainability. We conduct qualitative, exploratory research, which combines a large scoping of cases with in-depth analysis to inform our conceptualization of an empirically grounded framework. We contribute to understanding the combinations of internal practices and external communication better and develop four different types of business sustainability: pretending, aspiring, signaling, and fully-fledged. Building on existing literature, we do not present these as better or worse states of sustainability but probe the ethical or pragmatic motives that lead businesses to assume their position. Thereby we uncover that there are justified and ethically questionable reasons for businesses to assume a certain type of sustainability. In contrast to existing literature, which has often assumed a static position, we also scrutinize the transition pathways businesses can take by moving from one type to another. We highlight five potential transition paths and develop strategic recommendations for how managers could foster or prevent such transitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has primarily highlighted the ability of social entrepreneurs to solve persistent social problems, but there is also notable research that has shown us the limitations of social entrepreneurship. Consistent with the latter, we argue that a combined 'solutionism' and an action bias in social entrepreneurship can lead to a reductive trap, which unduly amplifies a social enterprise's ability to address a social problem. We further show how social entrepreneurship research, when studying social impact through a standard performance approach or by blackboxing the entrepreneurial process, generates a second reductive trap. Together, the reductive traps propel a vicious circle that impedes organizational learning and limits effective social problem solving. Based on this constructive critique, we argue that alternative conceptual approaches, which value processes and embrace reflexivity, may serve to address these shortcomings. To illustrate our argument, we use Bourdieu's capitals theory to analyze a social enterprise's program to promote prosocial behavior in schools. This allows us to demonstrate how a capitals theory approach can help overcome the identified reductive traps and initiate a virtuous circle between social entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social innovations create social value, but are severely underfunded. Globally, new public-private initiatives seek to build special financial infrastructures for social innovation. We study these initiatives under the lens of nascent markets and as a new type of financial engineering, which refers to purposeful, public-private efforts of creating new market infrastructures that support social value. We develop a typology of how these efforts pursue modest adjustments or more radical alternatives to capitalism. We also specify the inherent partnership and governance challenges, and how this affects the functioning of markets. First, financing social innovation introduces impact in addition to return and risk as a key criterion for governing markets. Second, there are positive and negative consequences of state intervention in promoting alternative models of capitalism. Third, shaping the social relations and institutional structure of markets in parallel can help unplug Ayn Rand's famous Atlas, who holds capitalism in a deadlock. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]