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Dr. Vera Cordeiro founded the NGO Associação Saúde Criança in 1991 to try to help poor families break the cycle of poverty and illness in Brazil. She and her team of employees and volunteers developed a holistic methodology to address the multidimensional sources of poverty based on the pillars of health, housing, citizenship, income, and education. After introducing the seeds of this approach, the case examines the evolution of the organization’s attempts to grow its social impact in Brazil and beyond—including a loose network of sister organizations, social franchising, licensing agreements, and government adoption.
Integrated hybrid organizations, for instance social enterprises that pursue both social and economic goals through a single activity, are seen by many as promising vehicles to create social value while remaining economically sustainable. At the same time, they are said to run the risk of mission drift—losing sight of their social mission while navigating market and political pressures. While organizational governance mechanisms that ensure the overall direction, control and accountability of the organization are considered key to avoiding mission drift, scholars have argued that traditional governance mechanisms may not work in the context of social enterprises. Drawing on the legacy of old institutional theory, this article proposes a proactive approach to governance in social enterprises. We complement and go beyond control and compliance approaches and introduce a governance approach focused on purpose, commitment and coordinating around small wins. We propose that these three interlocking governance mechanisms allow social enterprises to mitigate the risk of mission drift in a proactive rather than reactive manner.
Hybrid organizations operate in a context of institutional plurality and enact elements of multiple, often conflicting institutional logics. Governance is highly relevant in navigating such an environment. This study examines how hybrid organizations set up their governance structures and practices. Building on survey data from 70 social enterprises, a subset of hybrid organizations, we identify two types of hybrid organization: conforming hybrids rely on the prioritization of a single institutional logic and dissenting hybrids use defiance, selective coupling and innovation as mechanisms to combine and balance the prescriptions of several institutional logics. We illustrate these mechanisms by drawing on the qualitative analysis of selected cases. This study refines current debates on social enterprises as hybrid organizations. Based on our findings, we speculate that some social enterprises might assume hybridity for symbolic reasons while others – genuine hybrids – do so for substantive reasons.
We argue that accounts of relationships among actors, actorhood and institutions are predominantly based on a spatial metaphor of actors operating within institutions. We outline how an inversion of this metaphor – i.e., the perspective that institutions inhabit actors – may prove generative for theory, particularly with respect to recent discussions about the microfoundations of institutions. We outline how communication and actorhood models function as transmission mechanisms of institutions from one actor to another. We conclude with a discussion of how the inverted metaphor of institutions inhabiting actors can be useful for future theoretical developments.
The Assembly of a Field Ideology: An Idea-Centric Perspective on Systemic Power in Impact Investing
(2019)
We advance a novel idea-centric perspective to study power-laden aspects of institutional life in fields. Our study includes data from the field of impact investing in Europe from 2006–2018, collected from the inside and analyzed collaboratively by inside and outside researchers. We develop an analytical tool based on dichotomies to detect latent forms of conflict that easily remain unnoticed and to see how some ideas become dominant while others are abandoned or sidelined. We display the assembly of a field ideology—a coherent system of ideas that shapes thinking, reasoning and acting in a field. Furthermore, we specify suppression as a mechanism that gives rise to and perpetuates systemic power in fields, restricting options and shaping what is valued. Our study provides insights into the dynamic nature of institutional life in fields, including alternative paths not taken and possible futures.
This article explains how relational activities affect the design of seemingly paradoxical contractual arrangements among groups of channel intermediaries in Nigeria. The study used a grounded theory approach to investigate and analyze the contractual processes of three groups of channel intermediaries representing three diverse industries. Findings reveal that social relational activities trigger a higher prevalence of word-of-mouth agreements among channel intermediaries, whereas a blend of commercial and social relational activities trigger a higher prevalence of written agreements. Furthermore, we find that negotiation domains moderate the relationship between relational activities and the design of contractual arrangements. Insights from our work offer contributions to the literature on paradoxes, relational embeddedness, and international business.