Social enterprises are a specific type of organizations which primarily pursue social mission while engage in commercial activities to sustain their development (Battilana&Dorado,2010;Galaskiewicz &Barringer,2012;Hoffman,Gullo&Haigh,2012). Since 2004, social enterprises have been sprung up throughout China. After a decade, social enterprises obtained the unprecedented development in China. Especially, they dedicated in solving diverse areas’ social issues, which include food safety, traditional cultural inheritance and environmental protection. Besides, they have become the main strength to promote social innovation and development.
Organizational theorists have argued for a long time that for accessing to core resources, organizations comply more readily with those multiple constituencies that they depend on, and they will serve constituencies’ demand. The external actors of organizations also will exert institutional demand on social enterprises (Dimaggio&Powell,1983). But social enterprises contain the well-established categories of business and charity (Austin, Wei-Skillern& Stevenson, 2006), and they cannot be recognized as nonprofit organizations nor business corporations. Therefore, they are hardly obtaining the commercial capital investment because social enterprises may put the social mission ahead of business mission. Otherwise, they achieve social mission through commercial activities. These hybrid logics cannot be accepted by the third sector (Pache&Santos,2010a).What is more, social enterprises have no legal identity in China The existence and approach of social enterprises function and its external environment illustrate an interesting conceptual question that how they can gain legitimacy in China?
For methodology, case study will be used in this research. We will select 3-5 social enterprises cases from Hangzhou City, Foshan City, Shanghai City. Case analysis, e.g. narrative analysis coding, and pattern matching will be used. We try to explain their legitimacy building behaviors in the perspective of social network by multi-case study. We expect to have the results that social enterprises try to cooperate with various kinds of organizations including enterprises, nonprofit organizations and government departments during their different development stages. And by maintaining relationships with its stakeholders in diverse intensity, social enterprises try to build a moderately fragmented network to reduce the institutional logic conflicts, which makes them to gain legitimacy.
This research has implications for understanding the development of social enterprises and highlight the central role of network governance in successful operation of it. Besides, this research could make three potential contributions. First, viewing network governance of social enterprises as a bundle of adoption strategies in China, we contribute to the literature by analyzing their legitimacy building behaviors from external perspective instead of from their internal organizational structures(Pache&Santos,2010b).Second, we did this research in the China context. Social enterprises have not been legal in the law in China, and in order to survive they have to build the legitimacy proactively. So this research may have some interesting results, which is quite different from the foreign context. Finally, this research will identify critical success factors of social enterprises and help them to manage their institutional environments, which may provide managerial and policy implications for future civil society development in China.
Reference
- Battilana J, Dorado S. Building Sustainable Hybrid Organizations: The Case of Commercial Microfinance Organization[J]. Academy of Management Journal, 2010, 53(6):1419-1440.
- Lan G Z, Galaskiewicz J. Innovations in Public and Non-profit Sector Organizations in China[J]. Management and Organization Review, 2012, 8(3):491–506.
- Haigh N, Hoffman A J. Hybrid Organizations: The Next Chapter of Sustainable Business[J]. Organizational Dynamics, 2012, 41(2):126–134.
- Dimaggio P J, Powell W W. Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields[C] American Sociological Review. 1983:147-160.
- Austin J, Stevenson H, Wei-Skillern J. Social and Commercial Entrepreneurship: Same, Different, or Both?[J]. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 2006, 30(1):1–22.
- Pache A C, Santos F. When worlds collide:the internal dynamics of organizational responses to conflicting institutional demands[J]. Academy of Management Review, 2010, 35(3):455-476.
- Pache A C, Santos F M. Inside the Hybrid Organization: An Organizational Level View of Responses to Conflicting Institutional Demands[J]. Ssrn Electronic Journal, 2010, 56(4):págs. 972-1001.
6. Institutionalization, scaling up and public policies
