Understanding the social enterprise ecosystem—from a multi-layered perspective

Social enterprises as hybrid organisations, aiming to achieve double or triple bottom lines, have become increasingly important vehicle to address a variety of social problems (Nicholls, 2006; Westall and Chalkley, 2007).... [ view full abstract ]

Social enterprises as hybrid organisations, aiming to achieve double or triple bottom lines, have become increasingly important vehicle to address a variety of social problems (Nicholls, 2006; Westall and Chalkley, 2007). Early writings have made great contributions to the theoretical development of social enterprise in regard to its definition, characteristics, model comparative studies, and managerial concerns in western countries (Defourny and Nyssens, 2006; 2010; Teasdale, 2012; Lumpkin et al, 2013; Doherty et al.,2014), the ecosystem of social enterprise was less discussed compared with above conventional researches. The scarce discussion of the ecosystem of social enterprises (Bloom and Dees, 2008; Roy et al., 2015, European Commission, 2014; 2016) stress the importance of external environmental impacts, including policy support, institutional environment, market and non-market conditions, in shaping the performance of social enterprises in the context of European countries. Few studies had shed light on the institutional context of China and how social enterprises worked under this context (Doherty et al, 2014), the dynamic of ‘agency’ of single social enterprise in respond to the external environment were also remain under studied.

This research discussed an ethnographic study of two community based social enterprises working with children who migrant within China to explore the complex ecosystem of social enterprises in the context of China. The reason for choosing this specific area is essentially for the practical concern. There are 35.81 million internal rural-urban migrant children in China by 2010, however, due to the Hukou (household registration) system and other overarching welfare policy restrictions, migrant children face a variety of challenges with respect to their school education opportunities, family and parenting, psychological health, and etc. after they migrating to urban areas (Women’s Federation, 2013). The chosen two SEs aim to promote social inclusion and improve unmet child well-being by providing community centre services, outreach activities and after-school services. This paper is going to answer three questions: What do social enterprises do to respond to the unmet needs of migrant children? What social impacts does SEs actually make on migrant children? And lastly, how do agency and structure shape the performance of social enterprises?

The researcher was immersed in each social enterprise for six weeks. Acting as a full-time volunteer, she was able to observe daily practices and the interactions between different groups (social enterprise employees, volunteers, migrant parents and children, and local authority officers). Data from these observations was triangulated with data from interviews and focus groups with members of these groups and document analysis.

The key contribution of this paper is to introduce a multi-layered analytical framework to explain the ecosystem of social enterprises by looking at its external environment and internal organisation structures as well as the interactions and relations between social enterprises and their stakeholders. Two separate ecosystem map were drawn to illustrate the two cases. This framework highlights the constraints of institutional context of China and the powerless of researched community based social enterprises in respond to the uncertain policy environment. By looking at their daily practice, this research also discussed the ‘need-driven’ mission drift, which is less discussed from previous studies.

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