Resumen de Organizing for social impact: boundaries, ambiguity and venture creation
Organizing for social impact has been gaining attention in the organization and management literature for its potential to solve grand societal issues, and for the challenges this endeavor poses. This dissertation leverages different research streams to further explore some of these challenges, such as managing tensions, mobilizing support, and creating dual-purpose ventures. For this purpose, I have devised three different chapters, two empirical and one theoretical. The first chapter examines how hybrid organizations manage and leverage their categories and boundaries. It is based on an 18-month ethnographic data collection in Link (pseudonym), an intermediary organization bridging social enterprises and other stakeholders such as mentors and investors. I find how hybrid organizations may leverage their ambiguous category through boundary work, showing how different boundary work strategies come to be, and how they are connected to hybridity tension apprehension. Maintaining both broad and narrow symbolic boundaries Link the pursuit of new actors (and potential stakeholders) to join the social enterprise category while avoiding social-business tensions, respectively. The second chapter is a theoretical review on ambiguity, a vital concept to understand the context and the strategy towards solving grand societal issues. This chapter provides conceptual clarity between ambiguity and its cognate concepts and synthesizes ambivalent findings on the consequences of ambiguity. I identify three loci of ambiguity situation, structure, and communication and discuss how ambiguity can either constrain or enable action in organizations. Finally, I identify how these consequences are bounded by temporality and level of ambiguity. The third and final chapter is an empirical study exploring founders motives behind the creation of social enterprises. Prior research had assumed social entrepreneurs diverged from their traditional counterparts in their motivations, intentions, and relative importance of creating social impact instead of self-interest. This chapter expands past studies by exploring the role of self-oriented motives in early-stage organizing in social entrepreneurship, as well as the importance of context in understanding self-oriented and prosocial motives.
