Paulo Cruz Filho
Université du Québec à Montréal
Paulo Cruz Filho (born in Curitiba, Brazil) is an academic on business, management, strategy and social economy & nonprofit organizations. He is a professor at FAE Business School, where he is the coordinator of two post-graduation programs on "Social Entrepreneurship" and on "Sustainability and Governance". Paulo is also one of the coordinators of the Integral Leadership Program, and he teaches strategy and management on graduation, post graduation and MBA programs. He is currently a PhD student at Université du Québec à Montréal, studying the strategic positioning of social enterprises. Paulo works as a research assistant at the Canadian Research Chair on Social Economy, is a member of ICSEM-EMES team (International Comparative Social Enterprise Models), a member of RILESS (Red de investigadores latinoamericanos de economía social y solidaria) and a member of the Association for Nonprofit and Social Economy Research (ANSER). Paulo is also main partner of the strategic management consulting firm Brain - Bureau de Inteligência Corporativa.
This paper explores the specificities of strategic positioning in social enterprises, organizations that are at the crossroads of the most recent developments within the third sector. Current research on strategic positioning is still fragmented into market or non-market analysis, respectively on for-profit enterprises (Barney, 1991 ; Deephouse, 1999 ; Hofer et Schendel, 1978 ; Porter, 1980, 1996 ; Treacy et Wiersema, 1995) and cooperatives (Álvarez-Coque et al., 2009 ; Goldsmith et Gow, 2005 ; Jussila et al., 2008 ; Vézina et Legrand, 2003), and on the non-market side, on non-profit organizations (Boehm, 1996 ; Chew, 2009 ; Frumkin et Kim, 2001 ; Hafsi et Thomas, 2005 ; Sosin, 2012).
Those studies, among others, largely ignore that social enterprises are part of a plural economy, where they have to articulate three principles of economic behavior: market, redistribution and reciprocity (Laville et al., 1999 ; Polanyi, 1944 ; Roustang et al., 1997). The establishment of a position in such a hybrid and complex environment is subject to a great deal of challenges. Different kinds of tensions arose because of the multiplicity of goals, stakeholders and resources that social enterprises must manage (Borzaga et Defourny, 2001 ; Evers, 2004 ; Laville et Nyssens, 2004). To deal with these tensions, should social enterprises adopt, adapt to or even combine current strategic orientations from for-profit, public or nonprofit organizations? If they adopt existing strategic positioning models and typologies, they risk to find themselves in a process of banalization/standardization or even instrumentalization, that is, of becoming respectively too similar to for-profit enterprises or public organizations (Laville et al., 2006 ; Malo et Vézina, 2004 ; Richez-Battesti et Oswald, 2010).
On the other side, should social enterprises develop their own models of strategic positioning to face these challenges? In that case, there is a risk of becoming too different from their for-profit competitors, losing their legitimacy as a competitive organization in the eyes of potential customers. Likewise, adopting a strategic positioning behavior that sets the social enterprise apart from the institutional norms and expectations of public authorities can limit their legitimacy to obtain funding. Between these two apparently opposing views, a third question emerges: should they balance these two strategic orientations (Deephouse, 1999 ; Semadeni, 2006), and try to adjust themselves depending on the situation and the context? This seems a promising venue to guide the strategic positioning of social enterprises, but how is it possible to achieve strategic positioning balance in a plural economy?
This complexity on the strategic positioning literature is still largely unexplored, especially because of the fragmentation between market and non-market perspectives. To address this gap, this paper explores the concept of strategy as a position (Porter, 1980 ; Séguin et al., 2008), based on a literature review of 79 publications about strategy, selected from a database containing more than 3000 references about social economy developed by the Canadian Research Chair on Social Economy. The content analysis of these publications shows that they are failing to fully integrate the solidarity perspective into strategic frameworks and models. The main argument of this paper is that, in order to fully understand the strategic positioning of social enterprises in a plural economy, an institutional and solidarity-based approach is needed. A solidarity approach to the positioning theory is proposed, through a framework composed by three pillars - namely competitiveness, solidarity and legitimacy - aiming to help achieve strategic positioning balance within social enterprises. The model considers the plural context in which they position themselves, the solidarity that guides the positioning process and the content of positioning strategies adopted. The application of the proposed framework is finally illustrated in an empirical case of a domestic help social enterprise.
KEYWORDS
Social enterprise, strategic positioning, strategic balance, solidarity approach, institutional theory.
Paper_Strategic_positionning_social_enterprises.pdf 