Navigating Challenging Fitness Landscapes: Social Entrepreneurship and the Competing Dimensions of Sustainability

This paper uses the concepts of organizational fitness and fitness landscapes to examine management challenges that arise from social entrepreneurship efforts. Organizations pursuing social entrepreneurship must manage based on the need to ‘do no harm’ across all three tenets of sustainability: social equity, economic prosperity, and environmental integrity. These three tenets may be in conflict with each other, but organizations that pursue social entrepreneurship must manage with all three of them in mind across a wide range of stakeholders. Extending research on managing organizational fitness in rugged fitness landscapes, this paper argues that social entrepreneurship organizations will need to engage in substantial search processes, will face particularly difficult challenges in managing goals and initiatives, and will need to move into environmental search and adaptive modes early in their maturation process.