The issue of building a favourable ecosystem for social enterprises gained in importance these two last decades (Hazenberg et al., 2016), following the changing conditions that social enterprises face in their environment (e.g. emergence of new approaches fostering social impact, blurred frontiers, reduction/reallocation of the available resources, emergence of new private funding actors with their own logics, etc.). Facing this evolving context, how to make sure that the SE ecosystem still provides the conditions under which social enterprises can successfully emerge and develop?
The term ‘ecosystem’ is used “in relation to the characteristics of the environment (…) that operate in various combinations to support or restrict social enterprise activity from flourishing in a particular context.” (Hazenberg et al., 2016, p. 206) Ecosystems are composed of different types of environmental conditions – norms, legal frameworks –, and various types of individual and organizational actors (Bloom & Dees, 2008) that contribute to a favourable environment through different functions (regulation, funding, training, etc.).
Studying the SE ecosystems implies to get interested in when, why and how the conditions for supporting social enterprises have emerged and developed (Roy et al., 2015); in a period of transition, the re-design of those conditions is also relevant. Starting from there, a first step of my research concerns a better understanding of the current SE ecosystem and its evolution over the past years. Using the Social Network Analysis (SNA) – that takes its roots in Simmel’s work (1909) and offers valuable insights in social entrepreneurship (Dufays & Huybrechts, 2014) –, I will draw the SE ecosystem to highlight how the SE initiatives connect to their supporting environment by qualifying the relationship in terms of intensity/importance and content (funding, training, expertise, ...).
In a second step, relying on the assumption that organizations are open systems (Scott, 2008), I will mobilize the arguments of two theoretical perspectives – resource dependence (Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978) and institutional work (Lawrence et al., 2009) – to better understand the interactions between the SE initiatives and their ecosystem. Those perspectives offer alternative explanations, particularly regarding the conception of the environment, the nature of the environment-organisation relationships and the motives for these relationships (Rijpens, 2014). It will permit to look deeper into the following issues: how does the ecosystem structure and evolve? Are some specific SE organizations (e.g. in terms of activity or ownership structure) connected to particular sections of the SE ecosystem? To what extent are social enterprises constrained by or able to shape their ecosystem? Etc.
To explore the research questions, I implement a qualitative approach, which is of particular interest to gain a rich understanding of the phenomenon within its context (Saunders et al., 2009). It also provides a certain flexibility to consider the temporal dimension, and to integrate alternative or new insights (Baumard & Ibert, 2007) in the understanding of the global picture. The research being closely linked to the Social Innovators’ Integration Lab (SIIL) and the development of the SIIL Atlas, the research questions are explored in Montreal (Quebec), within the geographical area of the Quartier de l’innovation, a unique ecosystem dedicated to foster any type of innovation and where social economy and social entrepreneurship initiatives are coexisting. Data are collected within the approximately forty social enterprises located within the QI through three main techniques: drawings of their SE ecosystem, semi-directed interviews with organizational actors and actors from the supportive environment, and documentary analysis.
My research aims to make some interesting contributions. First, it brings organization theory into research on the SE ecosystem with the objective to overcome the sole description of the SE ecosystem and to support research with a solid theoretical and empirical basis. Secondly, it intends to explore the emergence, structuration and evolution of the SE ecosystem, as well as the role of specific actors in those developments, which contributes to better understand the interactions. Finally, it contributes to help advances in the practical understanding of the current shortcomings and favourable elements in the SE ecosystem to foster and support the emergence and scaling-up of social enterprises, and thereby to contribute to build more sustainable societies.
6. Institutionalization, scaling up and public policies
