Poverty and economic disenfranchisement are significant social problems that impact disadvantaged populations disproportionately due to barriers to their entering the labor market. The Work Integration Social Enterprise (WISEs) is a type of organization that harnesses the excitement around social entrepreneurship to address chronic unemployment. WISEs bring the low-qualified, long-term unemployed at risk of permanent exclusion from the labor market into the workforce through product or service sales that generate revenue for the social enterprise (Battilana et al., 2014; Defourny and Nyssens, 2008; Garrow and Hasenfeld, 2012). However, WISEs face challenges because they embody both social mission and market logics, which provide “rules of the game” (Jay, 2013) that potentially contradict one another. On the one hand, a market logic emphasizes profit, competition and commercial relationships between people. It promotes salesmanship and service delivery, fiduciary responsibility, is constrained by scarce client attention and resources, and leads to a focus on business imperatives (Billis, 2010; Doherty et al., 2014; Jay 2013). Business imperatives include production deadlines, business-customer relations, quality control, expansion, competitive market position, growth by acquisition and increasing market channels, and capital committed to market returns (Cooney, 2006; Thornton, 2002). On the other hand, a social mission logic emphasizes social objectives, public service and solidarity. It embodies aims of social change (Mair et al, 2012) to “explicitly improve societal well-being” (Perrini, 2006). It promotes social service provision, collective action, empowerment and education; is guided by the normative expectations of stakeholders; and is funded by grants, donations, and fees (Billis, 2010; Doherty et al., 2014; Jay 2013). It leads to a focus on social service goals and program requirements including grant deadlines, delivery targets, program content such as skill building, and networking with like-minded organizations (Cooney 2006; Thornton, 2002). Given the dual logics embodied within social enterprises, these organizations might anticipate internal conflict. Indeed, research suggests that multiple institutional logics create incompatible goals in organizations (Pinch and Sunley, 2015). Besharov and Smith (2014) label organizations with two central logics and incompatible goals “contested” organizations. They pick out these organizations as particularly ripe for high levels of internal conflict. Given this context, this study explored two questions: how the founders and leaders of WISEs understand the relationship of the two logics to each other; and how founders and leaders manage tensions that arise from these contradictory imperatives. The study applied a qualitative case study methodology (Eisenhardt, 1989) using in-depth interviews (Weiss, 1994) with social entrepreneurs in nationally recognized American WISEs to assess how they perceived and managed logic tensions. The study revealed that eight of the ten WISEs emphasized one dominant logic and did not perceive significant internal conflict. Only two cases experienced prolonged and ultimately irreconcilable tensions between their social mission and market goals, when social entrepreneurs were guided by the blended logics of providing training and services to disadvantaged populations within a for-profit legal form. This research suggests that WISE founders perceive market and social mission logics as options to be selected. Thus, while founders do not perceive tensions, in fact they have maneuvered the “rules of the game” from two dominant logics to one dominant and one subsidiary logic. WISEs that try to maintain two dominant logics struggled to succeed.
1. Concepts and models of social enterprise worldwide
Woodside_Dominant_Logics_and_US_WISEs.pdf 