There is an increasing academic attention in how social enterprises (SE) founders identify opportunities to generate social impact using commercial approaches. However, SEs, as organisations combining the ostensibly contradictory logics of charity and business, are faced with tensions that arise from their hybridity, which in turn, present difficulties in instilling these logics are various levels of the organisations. Especially at the start-up phase, the alignment of charity and business opportunities is a difficult balance (Doherty et al., 2014). Prioritising one over the other has significant implications in the hybrid integrity of social enterprises. If the tension is unresolved, it could lead to mission drift or the breakup of hybridity, as can be deduced from some studies (Glynn, 2000; Zilber, 2002).
In pursuing opportunities, SE founders do not necessarily know how to balance the logics ex ante; only while in operation do they find out how (Shepherd, 2015; Alvarez et al., 2014). As such, SE founders often must refine and revise the opportunities along the way (McMullen and Dimov, 2013)
Nonetheless, our knowledge of opportunity refinement and revision is pre-theoretical. At best, extant empirical studies on SE opportunity exploitation have acknowledged the existence of change, but relegate it to the periphery (Korsgaard, 2011; Yitshaki and Kropp, 2016). Addressing this research gap, this paper asks the question: how do social enterprises over time refine and revise the opportunities they initially set out to exploit? The objective is to propose a processual theory on social entrepreneurial opportunity refinement and revision.
Empirically, the paper studies the phenomenon in the contextual domain of post-disaster recovery environments, where an increasing number of SEs are emerging. Particularly, this paper focuses on 8 SE founders who set up shop immediately after the Haiyan disaster in 2013 in the southern island of the Philippines, Leyte. Enterprise founders were interviewed over 12 months, as they further refined and changed their SE opportunities.
The research offers two important insights. Firstly, in comparison to development and aid workers, social enterprise founders are more open-minded in altering recovery solutions, willing to change paths depending on their experiences on the ground, a behaviour that is unlike that of humanitarian and development agency practitioners who often comply with top-down organisational mandates that seem to limit flexibility and stifle the effectuation process in disaster recovery management. Secondly, the paper’s findings suggest that opportunity change is driven by a myriad of factors, but the one that is understated is benefactor logic, which is different from the social and commercial logics discussed in extant literature.
References:
Alvarez, S. A., Barney, J. B., McBride, R., & Wuebker, R. (2014). Realism in the study of entrepreneurship. Academy of Management Review, 39(2), 227-231.
Battilana, J., & Lee, M. (2014). Advancing research on hybrid organizing–Insights from the study of social enterprises. The Academy of Management Annals, 8(1), 397-441.
Doherty, B., Haugh, H., & Lyon, F. (2014). Social enterprises as hybrid organizations: A review and research agenda. International Journal of Management Reviews, 16(4), 417-436.
Glynn, M. A. (2000). When cymbals become symbols: Conflict over organizational identity within a symphony orchestra. Organization Science, 11(3), 285–298.
Korsgaard, Steffen. "Opportunity formation in social entrepreneurship." Journal of Enterprising Communities: People and places in the global economy 5.4 (2011): 265-285.
McMullen, J. S., & Dimov, D. (2013). Time and the entrepreneurial journey: The problems and promise of studying entrepreneurship as a process. Journal of Management Studies, 50(8), 1481-1512.
Sabeti, H. (2011). The for-benefit enterprise. Harvard Business Review November (Schwab Foundation, N.D.: ‘Five Year Evaluation Report: 2000–2005’, 07 April 2010).
Shepherd, D. A. (2015). Party On! A call for entrepreneurship research that is more interactive, activity based, cognitively hot, compassionate, and prosocial. Journal of Business Venturing, 30(4), 489-507.
Yitshaki, Ronit, and Fredric Kropp. "Motivations and opportunity recognition of social entrepreneurs." Journal of Small Business Management 54.2 (2016): 546-565.
Zahra, S. A., Rawhouser, H. N., Bhawe, N., Neubaum, D. O., & Hayton, J. C. (2008). Globalization of social entrepreneurship opportunities. Strategic entrepreneurship journal, 2(2), 117-131.
Zilber, T. (2002). Institutionalization as an interplay between actions, meanings, and actors: The case of a rape crisis center in Israel. Academy of Management Journal, 45, 234–254.
2. Social innovation and social entrepreneurship
