Framing conflicting demands and strategies for managing hybridity in social enterprises

ABSTRACT

Research has shown that social enterprises must constantly balance conflicting demands between their social and economic goals. However, little is known about the factors that shape managers’ strategic choices in response to the tensions associated with social enterprises’ hybrid nature. To address this issue, we conducted a case study analysis of six work integration social enterprises that draws on insights from previous literature on organizational hybrids and managerial frames. This study identifies two distinct cognitive frames that managers adopt to interpret the hybrid condition of their organization, balancing and integrative, each of which is associated with different types of strategies for managing hybridity, defensive and exploratory, respectively. Additionally, we unveil the mechanisms through which these frames shape hybrid strategies, namely, through the representation of the environment, representation of agency, and capability to integrate conflicting prescriptions. These results underscore the individual agency of managers and their idiosyncratic cognitive processes as important explanatory factors for the wide array of strategic responses observed in the management of social enterprises.

KEYWORDS:

• Social enterprise
• hybrid organizations
• institutional logics
• paradox management
• cognitive frames
• strategic choices
• hybridity management
• managerial agency

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical approval

At the time the study was designed, the requirement for approval in the case of this type of research was waived by the ethics committees of our universities. The dataset preserves participant confidentiality by eliminating all identifying information.

Informed consent

All participants were previously informed about the purpose of the study, the nature of their involvement, and the time it would require. The authors made it clear that, to the best of their knowledge, participation in the research would entail no potential risks and discomforts, nor provide any direct benefit. All participants gave appropriate informed consent to take part in the study.

Notes

1. This is so, although the perspective of institutional logics recognizes that individuals have the agency to reinterpret logics prescriptions, to combine or compartmentalize elements of different logics, or to resist conflicting prescriptions (Besharov and Smith 2014; Skelcher and Rathgeb Smith 2015; Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury 2013).