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Insufficient access to medicines is a persistent global problem that affects billions of people in low- and middle-income countries. In this chapter, we use access to medicines as a case to understand how business can become instrumental in making progress on persistent and global problems we associate with sustainable development. We examine the emergence and evolution of access to medicines as a mandate for the pharmaceutical industry to contribute to sustainable development. More specifically, we trace the historical developments of corporate social initiatives in the industry and revisit existing research on access to medicines in management and related fields. We then introduce three distinct analytical perspectives - field emergence and change, firm heterogeneity, organizational processes - to examine access to medicine, expose managerial challenges and offer a research agenda that helps to advance research on access to medicines and, more generally, on corporate efforts to address pressing global problems subsumed under the Sustainable Development Goals.
In this chapter we argue that hybrid organizations, i.e., organizations pursuing dual goals, are an important site for rethinking and potentially recasting our perspective on organizational governance. We give an overview of the specific governance challenges hybrid organizations face and probe conventional and more novel approaches and their potential to understand governance in hybrid organizations. Introducing empirical findings from a large-scale qualitative and quantitative study about governance in social enterprises, we propose to complement the reactive approach dominant in the governance literature with a more proactive approach: drawing on the work of Philip Selznick, we introduce a governance approach focused on purpose, commitment and new ways of coordination. We propose that these three interlocking governance mechanisms allow hybrid organizations such as social enterprises to mitigate governance challenges such as the risk of mission drift in a proactive rather than reactive manner.
In this chapter, we assess the link between scaling, control and organizational achievements. We argue that control is essential to coordinate organizational members towards a common and shared goal and to provide guardrails for scaling. We use the experience of the Aravind Eye Care System, a non-profit organization based in India providing eye care services to poor people to specify the mechanisms employed by Aravind underpinning three popular organizational scaling modes—branching, affiliation and dissemination. Our objective is to show how control and scaling can be combined in order to protect the value base of a social enterprise and at the same time ensure growth.
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.
Social enterprises have long been considered ideal settings for studying hybrid organizing due to their combination of social and economic goals and activities. In this chapter, the authors argue that the current research focus on hybrid organizing foregrounds the paradox, conflicting logics, and multiple identities associated with the pursuit of multiple goals but underappreciates the relationship between hybrid organizing and its institutional context. Recognizing that the primary objective of social enterprises is to tackle social problems, the authors introduce the social problem domain as an analytically useful and theoretically interesting meso-level to examine the role of context for hybrid organizing and to advance conversations on hybridity in organizational theory. Social problem domains offer insights into the political, cultural, and material differences in how various societies deal with social problems, which in turn affects hybrid organizing. The authors provide empirical insights derived from an analysis of social enterprises across three countries and social problem domains. The authors show how the institutional arrangements of social enterprises differ considerably across contexts, and how these arrangements affect how social enterprises become more or less similar compared to traditional ways of organizing in these problem domains. Based on these findings, the authors outline a research agenda on social enterprises that focuses on examining the nature, antecedents, and outcomes of hybrid organizing around social problems across multiple levels of analysis. With this chapter, the authors move the focus of social enterprise research in organizational theory from studying how these organizations cope with multiple logics and goals toward studying how they engage in markets for public purpose.
Sharing Economy
(2020)
The sharing economy can be understood as a web of markets in which individuals exchange goods and services. Market exchange is typically based on transactions mediated by a digital platform operated by an organization (Mair and Reischauer 2017). The multiple legal forms, orientations, and modes of compensation these organizations adopt combined with the broad range of markets including food, tool, and ride-sharing exemplify the potential of the sharing economy to nurture alternative forms of organizing with social purpose (Mair and Rathert forthcoming) to affect the economy, society, and the environment in new ways (Frenken and Schor 2017).
Social enterprises address social problem by means of markets. Over the last two decades they have become increasingly popular across geographies. During this time open contestation and ideological debates over the promise, intention and meaning of social entrepreneurship have dominated public discourse but also inhibited the development of a solid knowledge base on social enterprises as a form of organizing in the spectrum of private action for public purpose.
The dominant way of seeing social enterprises as pursuing dual – commercial and social – goals and as ideal sites to study the battle of logics confines our way of looking and limit the theorizing potential around social enterprise. In this chapter I advocate for disciplined exploration approach to study social enterprises to expose this potential. I draw from a collaborative research project involving 1,045 social enterprises across nine countries and show patterns and common features of social enterprises regarding their choice of legal form, their participation in the market for public purpose, their social footprint, and their role in changing local institutional arrangements. I argue that embracing rather than taming the diversity of social enterprises opens opportunities for developing new but more importantly for recasting, refining and connecting existing theories.
Outlining both historical foundations and the latest research trends, this Research Handbook offers a unique and cutting-edge overview of the numerous avenues to responsible management.
Opening with a conceptual mapping of the field, thought leaders such as Henry Mintzberg and Archie Carroll present foundational and controversial views. Frameworks such as sustainability management, responsible leadership, humanistic and biomimetic management are introduced. Glocal approaches include responsible management with Chinese characteristics, West African Yoruba, and American Pragmatism. Exploring frameworks for the responsible management process, such as theories of practice, and for responsible management learning and innovation, readers are introduced to key methods responsible management research, such as participatory action research.
Groundbreaking in scope and depth, this Handbook caters to the responsible management research community, particularly to the Academy of Management and to United Nations PRME signatory business schools. Policymakers and practitioners will benefit from its insight into the latest advances in responsible management research.
Variety and Trajectories of New Forms of Organizing in the Sharing Economy: A Research Agenda
(2020)
The sharing economy is one of the most influential developments of the last decade. The emergence of new forms of organizing it brings with it has affected modern (business) life at multiple levels: Sharing organizations have blurred the distinction between the individual roles of provider, user, and employee; they have introduced organizational practices of coordinating members and communities; and they have sparked societal, political, and economic debates in multiple fields. These dynamics at the individual, organizational, and field level provide an opportunity for organization scholars to take stock of and theorize the sharing economy.
This volume takes advantage of this opportunity by presenting a collection of empirical and conceptual work that explores the variety and the trajectories of new forms of organizing in the sharing economy, and in doing so builds on, rejuvenates, and refines existing organization theories.
Together, the chapters included in this volume offer a comprehensive overview of theoretically grounded research that deepens our understanding of new forms of organizing and indicates future avenues for research.
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) continues to grow as an area of interest in academia and business. Encompassing broad topics such as the relationship between business, society, and government, environmental issues, globalization, and the social and ethical dimensions of management and corporate operation, CSR has become an increasingly interdisciplinary subject relevant to areas of economics, sociology, and psychology, among others.
New directions in CSR research include advanced 'micro' based investigations in organizational behaviour and human resource management, additional studies of environmental social responsibility and sustainability, further research on 'strategic' CSR, connections between social responsibility and entrepreneurship, and improvements in methods and data analysis as the field matures. Through authoritative contributions from international scholars across the social sciences, this Handbook provides a cohesive overview of this recent expansion. It introduces new perspectives, new methodologies, and new evidence from a range of disciplines to encourage and facilitate interdisciplinary research and global implementation of corporate social responsibility.