Balancing dual missions for social venture growth: a comparative case study

ABSTRACT

Balancing social and economic missions in the pursuit of growth is one of the greatest challenges faced by social ventures. Although social ventures strive for growth to scale their social impact, pursuing growth often results in mission drift and the sacrifice of social objectives, which in turn eventually undermine the ventures’ raison d’être. In this study, we investigate how and with what outcomes social ventures that pursue growth can manage the balance of social and economic missions. Through a comparative case study of six for-profit social ventures, we find significant differences in how dual missions are selected, connected, and intertwined, leading to varying degrees of mission spillover effects between social and economic missions. Our findings show that two-sided mission spillover effects are a central mechanism in dual mission management, enabling social ventures to pursue balanced growth, avoid mission drift, and achieve social impact. With these findings, this study adds to the emergent literature on social entrepreneurship, dual mission management, and social venture growth.

KEYWORDS:

• Social entrepreneurship
• social venture growth
• dual mission management
• mission spillover effects
• mission drift
• balance

Acknowledgement

We are very grateful to our Editor Alistair Anderson and the anonymous reviewers for their excellent suggestions and thoughtful guidance in developing this manuscript. We would also like to express our gratitude for the constructive and insightful comments and detailed feedback from Steffen Korsgaard and Matthias Raith. Nicole Siebold is grateful to the Department of Management at Aarhus University for its hospitality during the inception of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Similar to other qualitative studies (e.g. Nag, Corley, and Gioia 2007), we provide a model at the beginning of our findings section, despite its emergence from an inductive process. We do this to provide clarity and structural coherence for the reader.