Refine
Document Type
- Part of a Book (1)
- Doctoral Thesis (1)
Language
- English (2)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (2)
Social enterprises are organisations that pursue a social mission using market mechanisms. From a policy perspective, they are promising vehicles to create both social and economic value for society in times when public funds are shrinking and the financial viability of charities and non-profit organisations (NPOs) is increasingly at stake. From a civil society perspective, they are an important organisational form to ensure longevity, financial viability, and sustainability of mission-driven organisations. Social enterprises are neither typical charities nor typical businesses but combine aspects of both, using commercial activities as means toward social ends. They are often small or medium-sized1 and do not draw on highly elaborated governance arrangements as do larger for- or non-profit organisations. Governance often resembles a grey zone for these organisations, and the approach social enterprises adopt ranges from formal, legally binding arrangements to more flexible and context-based ones.
The dissertation focuses on the strategizing activities of new-style social enterprises in the highly institutionalized German social service provision sector. More specifically, it focuses on understanding and highlighting the characteristics of highly institutionalized environments taking the case of Germany, and then examines how smaller new entrants strategize in these environments in order to achieve their goals. This is important because there is more limited understanding of how small new entrants operate in highly institutionalized contexts, which is likely to differ from other types of contexts.
The study is built upon a qualitative research design with three in-depth case studies of social enterprises at its core, which were investigated through semi-structured interviews, organizational observation, and secondary data analysis.
The inductive analytical process resulted in the following findings. Firstly, a highly institutionalized field is characterized by stability and density of institutional conditions that manifest through four characteristics: a high regulatory degree, strongly embedded established social service providers, strong and stable financial resource flows and high stability of cognitive schemes regarding social service provision.
Secondly, the strategizing activities of smaller new entrants highlight the important balance between compliance to, and divergence from, institutional prescriptions and expectations that organizations experience. In order to achieve their organizational goals
in this environment, social enterprises develop four strategizing areas in order to manage divergence: problem specification, interaction with established providers, mobilizing financial resources and mobilizing symbolic resources.
The findings contribute to previous research in three ways. Firstly, they contribute to a better specification of highly institutionalized fields based on the perceptions of organizations operating in these environments. Secondly, the findings contribute to the understanding of simultaneous compliant and divergent organizational behavior and its connection to concrete institutions. Thirdly, the findings provide a more fine-grained understanding of the strategizing areas available to and used by new entrants in highly institutional fields in order to cope with the institutional forces that they encounter. This sheds light on the importance of differentiating between types of organizations and types of fields in order to understand the dynamics and the interplay between institutions and the capacity for action of organizations.