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Organizations across sectors appear to be shifting their ambitions from solving social problems to changing entire social systems. This phenomenon offers a timely opportunity to revisit what came to be known as the third mandate of organizational theory. In this paper we interrogate how organizational scholarship can productively explore and theorize the relationship between organizations and social systems in organized system change – an effort by organizations to alter the conditions that generate the characteristics of social problems and their dynamics of change. As a basis for theorizing organized system change, we develop an analytical scaffold that helps researchers to attend to fundamental aspects of the phenomenon and to achieve parsimony without blanking out complexity. Grounded in realist metatheory and principles, the scaffold reduces ambiguity, provides a backbone for empirical analysis, and favours mechanism-based explanation. We suggest that generating theoretically interesting and practically adequate knowledge on organized system change requires attention to three system realms: First, the subjectively constructed problem realm of systems concerned with processes of evaluating and problematizing situations. Second, the objectively constituted situational realm that attends to factual characteristics of situations and their dynamics of change. And third, the realm of causality understood as the mechanisms that generate both the objective characteristics of situations and the subjective criteria by which situations are evaluated as problems. In concluding, we reflect on the topics of boundaries and power as two promising areas for theorizing organized system change.
Editorial notes in leading management journals have urged scholars to address Grand Challenges (GC) as an opportunity for producing knowledge that matters for society. This review explores whether current conceptualizations of GC support a productive path for management and organizational scholarship by guiding empirical inquiry, facilitating cumulative theory development, and informing practice. We systematically examine scholarly articles, calls for papers, and editorial notes published in management journals for consistency in how researchers use and define the concept of GC and the scope of associated phenomena and attributes. We find three prominent conceptual architectures in use: discursive, family resemblance, and phenomenon driven. The variety and incoherence of current uses of the GC concept and the lack of efforts to improve its analytical competence lead us to suggest its retirement. Instead, we propose building on the enthusiasm around GC research and using GC as a term to define research principles that collectively help align research efforts and improve theoretical development and practice. The principles we propose capture a genuine origin story for management research on GC.
This study advances research on organizational efforts to tackle multidimensional, complex, and interlinked societal challenges. We examine how social inequality manifests in small-scale societies, and illustrate how it inheres in entrenched patterns of behavior and interaction. Asking how development programs can be organizing tools to transform these patterns of inequality, we use a program sponsored by an Indian non-governmental organization as our empirical window and leverage data that we collected over a decade. We identify “scaffolding” as a process that enables and organizes the transformation of behavior and interaction patterns. Three interrelated mechanisms make the transformation processes adaptive and emerging alternative social orders robust: (1) mobilizing institutional, social organizational, and economic resources; (2) stabilizing new patterns of interaction that reflect an alternative social order; and (3) concealing goals that are neither anticipated nor desired by some groups. Through this analysis, we move beyond conventional thinking on unintended consequences proposed in classic studies on organizations, complement contemporary research about how organizations effect positive social change by pursuing multiple goals, and develop portable insights for organizational efforts in tackling inequality. This study provides a first link between the study of organizational efforts to alleviate social problems and the transformation of social systems.
Water is Power
(2017)
Profitable business models and market creation in the context of deep poverty: A strategic view
(2007)
The bottom of the pyramid (BOP) in the global distribution of income has been promoted as a significant opportunity for companies to grow profitably. Under the BOP approach, poor people are identified as potential customers who can be served if companies learn to fundamentally rethink their existing strategies and business models. This involves acquiring and building new resources and capabilities and forging a multitude of local partnerships. However, current BOP literature remains relatively silent about how to actually implement such a step into the unknown. We use two BOP cases to illustrate a strategic framework that reduces managerial complexity. In our view, existing capabilities and existing local BOP models can be leveraged to build new markets that include the poor and generate sufficient financial returns for companies to justify investments.
Digital democracy
(2006)
Comite para Democratizacao da Informatica (CDI) is a non-political, non-profit, and non-governmental organization founded in Brazil in 1995. It aims to promote the social inclusion of less-privileged people, using information and communication technologies to teach them the basic concepts of self-esteem, citizenship and their rights as individuals. CDI executive director and founder Rodrigo Baggio's first step was to launch a campaign called "Computers for All", where companies were contacted and asked to donate used computers to the favelas. The next step was to create computer schools in the slums. In response to demand for new schools in other Brazilian states and beyond, CDI designed a "social franchise" model. The idea was to set up regional CDI offices to create new schools. Students are motivated to develop ideas that generate income and give them better employment prospects. The challenge now is for Baggio and his team to manage growth without losing the original vision of CDI.
Over the last few years many business schools have been active in developing courses on social entrepreneurship. The case studies used are typically based on non-profit initiatives aimed at alleviating social problems in the community. Yet social entrepreneurship is not limited in scope and structure. It is neither geographically nor culturally centered. To avoid the dilemma of defining what social entrepreneurship is or what it is not, we argue that the most fruitful approach is to adopt a specific perspective that illuminates the role and the unique contribution of social entrepreneurship. The perspective we propose is 'sustainable development'. This approach also permits the positioning of social entrepreneurship alongside existing organizations that participate in the global efforts to achieve sustainable development. We describe initiatives by social entrepreneurs and established corporations, highlight the social, economic and environmental impact, and draw out commonalities from the examples given.
Social entrepreneurship can be a powerful tool for corporations to gain entry and build loyalty in developing markets. While economic growth has led to tremendous improvements in personal freedoms and well-being for people in industrialised societies, it has left too many behind. The images of hunger, disease and human misery refuse to disappear from our television screens. How can growth be made more sustainable while at the same time including and benefiting all of society? The paradox is painful: while traditional markets are saturated, billions of people are desperately waiting for companies to cater to their most basic needs and wants. Social entrepreneurs act as change agents that enable the poor to participate in economic life. Entrepreneurs invent business models that can be scaled up and possibly repeated elsewhere: the Grameen Bank model has been replicated all over the world, with huge success. Social entrepreneurship initiatives also constitute local resources that lend themselves to new configurations for novel forms of value creation.
The term “social entrepreneurship” (SE) is used to refer to the rapidly growing number of organizations that have created models for efficiently catering to basic human needs that existing markets and institutions have failed to satisfy. Social entrepreneurship combines the resourcefulness of traditional entrepreneurship with a mission to change society. One social entrepreneur, Ibrahim Abouleish, recently received the “Alternative Nobel Prize” for his Sekem initiative; in 2004, e-Bay founder Jeff Skoll donated 4.4 million pounds to set up a social entrepreneurship research center; and many social entrepreneurs have mingled with their business counterparts at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Social entrepreneurship offers insights that may stimulate ideas for more socially acceptable and sustainable business strategies and organizational forms. Because it contributes directly to internationally recognized sustainable development (SD) goals, social entrepreneurship may also encourage established corporations to take on greater social responsibility.