Establishing Social Enterprises as a Unique Organizational Type: A Mission-Value Grid

Abstract

Over last two decades, Social enterprises have established themselves as globally relevant ventures exhibiting innovative and sustainable social value creation processes and addressing long-standing social issues through entrepreneurial process. Because of their unique combination of private structure with public purpose, strong connection to citizens, flexibility in operations, ability to innovate, and capacity to tap private resource for public purpose, SEs have emerged as strategically important organizational forms Despite growing interest for social entrepreneurship in academic literature and practices, the body of scholarly research is still much less developed. One of the primary reasons for lack of development in social entrepreneurship domain is difficulties in differentiating social enterprise from other type of organizations. In this paper, we used the concept of value and mission, to propose a grid, which helps to distinguish social enterprises from other enterprise types. This paper argues that working to incorporate negotiation outputs of diverse stakeholder groups, within a plurality of institutional logics, the different enterprise types reflect their distinct design, resourcing and strategy types through their business models. Given the challenges of matching demand and supply side constraints, particularly in the challenging situation of rapid scaling up, hybrid organizational types like social enterprise face greater challenges to identifying effective business models compared to commercial organizations narrowly focused on maximizing benefits of shareholders or owners.