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Community Orientated and Opportunity Learning (COOL) Music was a 12-month collaborative project between researchers at Glasgow Caledonian University and practitioners at the Edinburgh-based social enterprise Heavy Sound. The project began in October 2017 and involved 16 sessions of participatory music making with 32 'hard-to-reach' young people (aged 12-17) aimed at increasing confidence and self-esteem and improving social skills. Using COOL Music as a case study, this article explores some of the challenges faced by community-based arts organisations tasked with delivering such interventions, contrasting COOL Music's small-scale, targeted, community-based approach with prevailing top-down music interventions in Scotland. We argue that such programmes are particularly suitable in engaging those at the margins of society, reaching them on their own terms through music that resonates with their own lived experience. However, we acknowledge the short-term and transitory nature of such projects may prove problematic for some hard-to-reach groups who require more stability in their lives and may also lead to staff fatigue and burnout. We call for further research in these areas, and greater policy attention to be paid to the sustainability of such projects.

Social innovation is an umbrella concept that allows space for a diverse range of perspectives to co-exist. In this paper, we explore how practitioners negotiate this complexity. Conducting 19 interviews with stakeholders involved in social enterprise and social care in Scotland, we show that almost anything can be conceived of as a social innovation as defined by the European Union. The EU definition can be a useful tool for organizations to demonstrate to funders how and why they are socially innovative. However, in failing to interrogate the power dimension of social innovation, the EU definition neglects any transformative potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nonprofits are increasingly involved in collaborative governance mechanisms, on the premise that their proximity to end users and better understanding of the local contexts can lead to better policy outcomes. Although government–nonprofit relations have been theorized and explored by several studies, few studies have examined specifically collaborative governance, instead focusing on other phases of policy development or service delivery. In this article, we present a realist evaluation of data gathered from in-depth semi-structured interviews (N = 41) and four focus groups with stakeholders involved in collaborative governance arrangements within "Strategic Public Social Partnerships" in Scotland. Our findings indicate that collaborative governance processes involving nonprofits can potentially lead to improved services through mechanisms such as the development of trust and the establishment of new learning dynamics, and when knowledgeable leadership and mutuality drive collaborations. However, this is only true if the long-term sustainability of these processes translates into the mainstreaming of both the resulting services and their underlying collaborative principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research explores ways public service ecosystems developed during the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on relationships between community-led mutual aid groups and the state. Data were collected through in-depth interviews, focus groups, and mobile ethnographic methods with 30 participants from the public sector and three mutual aid groups across Scotland. We show how relationships between mutual aid groups and the state – whether complementary, supplementary, or adversarial – shifted over the course of the pandemic. Our findings add nuance to understandings that presuppose mutual aid as antagonistic, highlighting ways that mutual aid groups may be brought into existing public service ecosystems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research Summary: Critical scholars recognize a disjuncture between the problems identified by social entrepreneurs and the solutions they propose. Existing theory treats this as a problem to be rectified at the organizational level. In this essay, we widen attention to the macro‐oriented systems change strategies of social entrepreneurs. We develop a dynamic typology showing how strategies are reassembled over time to stimulate or deflect desire for systems change. Deriving inspiration from Goffman, we theorize the ways that different types of systems change actor perform systems change via interaction with their environments. Drawing on illustrative cases on the boundaries of social entrepreneurship, we show how the collective action frameworks developed by systems change actors can be adapted and repurposed by their (systems) audiences: effectively turning rebellion into money. Managerial Summary: Social entrepreneurs often call for systems change to tackle wicked problems such as poverty or climate change. However, the strategies they propose for tackling these problems, such as lending money to poor people are considerably less radical. In this essay, we identify three types of systems change actor distinguished by the degree of systems change they call for. We trace their ideas over time to illustrate how strategies are mediated, and subsequently repurposed through interaction with the systems they seek to change. In conclusion, we call upon researchers and social entrepreneurs to widen their perspectives to incorporate more radical ideas and potentials for systems change, and for greater attention to be devoted to scrutinizing and protecting the integrity of systems change strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to investigate the scientific literature on the management of tensions and trade-offs in hybrid organizations. These can arise from the hybrid nature of these organizations and involve diverse aspects relevant for their management. From our corpus of 16 papers, we assessed as being of 'high quality', we categorized different types of tensions and the solutions put forward to manage or mitigate those tensions. The systematic literature review is subdivided into five categories: (1) framing the question(s); (2) identifying relevant works; (3) collecting data; (4) analyzing evidence; (5) interpreting the findings. An iterative process of discussion about codes helped us to compose the final categories for analysis. Our results explain how hybrid organizations go through a constant process of balancing various logics, and how this balancing works to address issues that are both endogenous and exogenous to the organization. We identify two strategies that organizations employ to manage hybridity—decoupling logics and logic shifting—and each strategy has different effects at different levels of the institutional context. Because we focus only on the literature assessed as being of 'high quality' this inevitably leads to many excluded articles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]