Achieving Social Sustainable Values Through Civic Engagement: A Case Study from Two Social Enterprise in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Motivation: My motivation for conducting this research project is to understand the sensemaking process of the members of Green Savers Bangladesh (GSB) and Yunus & You Ventures (YYV) to understand the key challenges to engage citizens and stakeholders to pursue social sustainability values through the organizational activities. This research project can contribute to the field of social entrepreneurship to grasp new knowledge in the country perspective of Bangladesh in understanding the key challenges in achieving social sustainability value creation through civic engagement through the lens of the case organization’s members. However, this research cannot be considered to assess all the other unexplored social enterprises in Bangladesh. I intend to apply Karl Weick’s theory of Organizational Sensemaking in understanding the sensemaking process of the members of the case organizations. Besides, Robert Putnam’s theory of Social Capital explained by Julia Häuberer is also applied to recognize the organizational strategies in building relationships with locality and engaging potential stakeholders. Overall, the social constructivist approach has been applied to understand the distinctive features of societal context and practices experienced by the members of GSB and YYV in creating knowledge and sensemaking to recognize key challenges. Objective: I aim to explore the two social enterprises in Bangladesh to understand how the members of GSB & YYV make sense of understanding key challenges while pursuing social sustainability value creation through civic engagement through their organizational activities. Research Method: A qualitative research method is applied to collect data from the field. A total of six qualitative semi-structured expert interviews have been conducted online. The thematic coding method is applied for data analysis and to generate thematic coding from the data NVIVO software was used. Besides, secondary data was also collected to enrich the to add new perspectives to data analysis. Conclusion: GSB is a social enterprise working closely with community people, different networks, and public and private institutions to advocate for ecological sustainability. YYV is aiming to engage potential entrepreneurs to create a sustainable social business in Bangladesh. GSB & YYV engage stakeholders/partners to sustain economically while creating value for society through organizational actions. Both GSB and YYV claimed to experience diverse challenges in operating organizational actions while engaging the community people and stakeholders. The members' empirical experiences explaining the past and current challenges reveal the formation of their sensemaking process.