Management Debates

Journal of General Management

Social enterprises constantly face inherent conflicts and tension between considerations of profit and considerations of their clients’ welfare. The directors of these enterprises have created a new form of management. This article presents the findings of a study that examined a management profile and style in Work Integration Social Enterprises. The article describes how the business or social profile of the entrepreneurs affects the challenges they face at various stages of the organization’s life cycle and the strategies that help them promote their unique mission.

2005

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of an investigation into the business practices of Social Enterprises in Greater Manchester and Lancashire. The aim was to look at the business practices of Social Enterprises (SEs) and obtain an understanding of the nuances and heterogeneity of management issues for these businesses through dense descriptive insights imbedded in the actual practices of owner/managers in SEs.

In this paper I will first be examining some of the academic and research issues that are current and yet-to-emerge in relation to social enterprise; and secondly attempting to illustrate some of these issues through discussion of a particular case-study organisation, a rural community broadband co-operative with which I have been closely involved since early 2005. I will in particular be focussing firstly upon questions of leadership in social enterprises, and secondly upon critical perspectives on the economic and political context within which social enterprises must perforce operate.

Social Enterprise Journal, 2007

Social Entrepreneurship and Enterprises in Economic and Social Development, 2020

This chapter on “Social Enterprises as Integrative Resources, Strategies, and Models” provides the framework for the rest of this section and text. It first describes the global social and economic problems that neo-conservative orthodoxy and public policy have not been able to correct. That is followed by articulating the basic premise that enterprises that simultaneously pursue both financial and social objectives achieve greater impact. The next section presents characteristics of business models and social enterprises, along with a template to create a social business model. The “strategy tripod” integrates these strategy and organization aspects by considering the micro (enterprise resources and core competences), macro (national institutions), and mezzo (industry forces) levels of enterprise strategy. Last, 10 exemplars are provided that have synthesized these concepts to alleviate a variety of disparities in different countries. The conclusion provides general lessons, and Ap...

Action Learning: Research and Practice, 2017

In a world filled with poverty, environmental degradation, and moral injustice, social enterprises offer a ray of hope. These organizations seek to achieve social missions through business ventures. Yet social missions and business ventures are associated with divergent goals, values, norms, and identities. Attending to them simultaneously creates tensions, competing demands, and ethical dilemmas. Effectively understanding social enterprises therefore depends on insight into the nature and management of these tensions. While existing research recognizes tensions between social missions and business ventures, we lack any systematic analysis. Our paper addresses this issue. We first categorize the types of tensions that arise between social missions and business ventures, emphasizing their prevalence and variety. We then explore how four different organizational theories offer insight into these tensions, and we develop an agenda for future research. We end by arguing that a focus on social-business tensions not only expands insight into social enterprises, but also provides an opportunity for research on social enterprises to inform traditional organizational theories. Taken together, our analysis of tensions in social enterprises integrates and seeks to energize research on this expanding phenomenon.

Papers in Arts and Humanities

Social enterprises are given special attention from a scientific and public policy point of view. In everyday life, we see them as organizations that can provide solutions to various social problems. From an academic perspective, they represent a new research topic with its own interdisciplinary nature. They have been examined mainly from the point of view of management and organizational culture. In terms of scientific analysis, the newly developed research area of social economy and social enterprises is still in the conceptualization phase. The theoretical and methodological framework for research measurements need to be finalized. In this study, we seek to answer the question of how social economy—in particular, the perception of social enterprises in international and Romanian literature—is changing as a result of economic and social changes in space and time. We examine the factors along which definitions of the social enterprise within social economy are attempted, and the in...

2018

This dissertation looks to explain the response of social enterprise in the face of organisational tensions from the implemented of strategic actions, mainly through company culture, organisational structure, and hiring process. Organisational tensions emerge through an organisation’s commitment to contradictory structures, cultures, practices and processes. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the strategic decisions taken by social enterprises operating in Portugal and explain how they allow them to deal with the internal tensions. To that purpose, a qualitative study was conducted based on semi-structured, face-to-face interviews to managers of social enterprise, and support through analysis of secondary data. The research concluded that the strategic actions helped the enterprises by ensuring a consistent level of internal communication, through the construction of a holographic company culture, and a hiring process that identified potential employees with a commitment to social...

2007

The objective of this note is to address the following four questions about social enterprises: 1. Why do we need social enterprises? 2. What differentiates social enterprises from economic enterprises? 3. How to accelerate the development of social enterprises worldwide? 4. What are the potential areas for research on social enterprises?