Filipe M. Santos

A Positive Theory of Social Entrepreneurship

I propose a theory aimed at advancing scholarly research in social entrepreneurship. By highlighting the key trade-off between value creation and value capture and explaining when situations of simultaneous market and government failure may arise, I suggest that social entrepreneurship is the pursuit of sustainable solutions to neglected problems with positive externalities. I further discuss the situations in which problems with externalities are likely to be neglected and derive the central goal and logic of action of social entrepreneurs, in contrast to commercial entrepreneurs. Overall, this article provides a conceptual framework that allows understanding the growing phenomena of social entrepreneurship and its role in the functioning of modern society.

EMBEDDED IN HYBRID CONTEXTS: HOW INDIVIDUALS IN ORGANIZATIONS RESPOND TO COMPETING INSTITUTIONAL LOGICS

In order to advance the micro-foundations of institutional theory, we explore how individuals within organizations experience and respond to competing institutional logics. Starting with the premises that these responses are driven by the individuals’ degree of adherence to each competing logic (whether novice, familiar, or identified), and that individuals may resort to five types of responses (ignorance, compliance, resistance, combination or, compartmentalization), we develop a comprehensive model that predicts which response organizational members are likely to activate as they face two competing logics. Our model contributes to an emergent political theory of institutional change by predicting what role organizational members are likely to play in the organizational battles for logics dominance or in organizational attempts at crafting hybrid configurations.

Making Hybrids Work: Aligning Business Models and Organizational Design for Social Enterprises:

Hybrid organizations pursuing a social mission while relying on a commercial business model have paved the way for a new approach to achieving societal impact. Although they bear strong promise, social enterprises are also fragile organizations that must walk a fine line between achieving a social mission and living up to the requirements of the market. This article moves beyond generic recommendations about managing hybrids in order to highlight a typology of social business hybrids and discuss how each of the four proposed types of hybrid organizations can be managed in order to avoid the danger of mission drift and better achieve financial sustainability.

The coevolution of firms and their knowledge environment: Insights from the pharmaceutical industry

Abstract What are the most effective learning strategies for firms given the characteristics of their knowledge environment? This paper addresses this question by documenting the major changes in the knowledge environment of the pharmaceutical industry, with a particular emphasis on the period since the emergence of biotechnology, and discussing the related changes in the learning strategies of established pharmaceutical firms. Both the historical analysis and a review of the empirical research on organizational learning and knowledge transfer reveal a strong emphasis of firms on external learning through interfirm collaborations and sourcing of external knowledge. This learning strategy seems to be driven by the speed, uncertainty, and dispersion of knowledge developments in the industry. Studying the connections between the knowledge environment and the effectiveness of organizational learning processes is important to understand organizational change and adaptation, and is an area of research that deserves further attention.

Inside the Hybrid Organization: An Organizational Level View of Responses to Conflicting Institutional Demands

This paper explores organizational responses to conflicting institutional demands. An inductive comparative case study of four social enterprises that scaled their organization while embedded in competing social welfare and commercial logics suggests that, when facing competing organizational templates imposed by their institutional environment, organizations attempt to strike a balance at the organizational level by adopting a combination of intact practices from both logics instead of balancing at the practice level by resorting to strategies such as decoupling. In addition, we find an important legitimating effect of founding origins: in a sector where the social welfare logic is ultimately predominant, organizations originating from the social sector benefited from an a priori legitimacy capital, which allowed them to borrow freely from both social and commercial practices. In contrast, organizations emanating from the commercial sector, suffering from an a priori legitimacy deficit, had to display their conformity with social templates in order to secure their acceptance in the field and therefore adopted predominantly social practices. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of hybrid organizations and point to the founding origins of organizations as an important determinant of the pattern of hybridization strategies.

Social Entrepreneurship and Broader Theories: Shedding New Light on the ‘Bigger Picture'

Abstract This article documents the results of a research workshop bringing together six perspectives on social entrepreneurship. The idea was to challenge existing concepts of the economy, the firm, and entrepreneurship in order to shed new light on social entrepreneurship and on our existing theoretical frameworks. The first two contributions use a macro-perspective and discuss the notion of adaptive societies and the tragedies of disharmonization, respectively. Taking a management perspective, the next two focus on the limits of conventional assumptions in management theory, particularly human capital theory and resource-based view. The final two contributions follow an entrepreneurship perspective highlighting the usefulness of mobilization theory and the business model lens to social entrepreneurship. Despite this diversity, all contributions share the fact that they challenge narrow definitions of the unit of analysis in social entrepreneurship; they illustrate the aspect of social embeddedness, and they argue for an open-but-disciplined diversity of theories in social entrepreneurship research.

The Market that Never Was: Clashing Frames and Failed Coalitions in Mobile Payments

In this paper, we focus on a key, but understudied process that affects the development of a new market: the interfirm negotiation process through which the interested parties agree on a business model to exchange resources in order to create the new product or service. We observed this process in the case of an emerging market around mobile payment services for over 40 months between 2006 and 2009. The results that emerge from our data illustrate that when several of the negotiating parties come from dominant positions in their distinctive markets, the development of the new market may come to a complete halt despite the readiness of the technology and proven consumer interest. We also show that when such deadlocks occur, the commercialization of the product may stop at the global level, but continue locally in places where the interdependency problem can be solved. By observing various countries, we describe three local pathways to commercialization: intrafirm coalitions, M&A, and the mediation of a trusted third party.

The role of information technologies for knowledge management in firms

The knowledge management field has been mostly the domain of consultants, practitioners, and information systems theorists. This field has evolved largely divorced from the more scholarly areas of research on knowledge, which include studies in the social psychology, organisational and sociology fields. Grounded on scholarly research in these disciplines, this paper analyses and critiques the dominant practices and prescriptions of knowledge management programs. The paper then presents a view on the elements of an optimal knowledge management system and specifies the role that technology should play in such a system.

The Life Cycle of Social Innovations

All over the world there are millions of social entrepreneurs that come up with potential social innovations. Some never get implemented in practice. Others are implemented, but then the passion fades or the solution does not reveal itself as promising for creating social impact. In some cases, the lack of sustainability or management capacity prevents a successful scaling up process. Despite all these potential obstacles, there are social innovations that go from promising ideas to becoming mainstream solutions, leading to new markets, industries, or social movements, such as Microfinance or Wikipedia. An in-depth look at main obstacles facing social innovators and the leadership skills required to overcome them is a meaningful contribution to the field of social innovation. The goal of this chapter is to propose such a contribution through an in-depth exploration of the life cycle of social innovation. The term “life cycle” implies a sequence of stages in the evolution of new ventures (Parker 2007).