This study explores the discourse of social entrepreneurs and their audiences in pitch situations. Adopting a practice perspective on social entrepreneurship, we videotaped 49 pitches by social ...entrepreneurs at five different events in two incubators in Germany and Switzerland. Our analysis of the start-ups’ pitches and the audience’s questions and comments as well as of interview data elucidates the nuances of social and business discourse that social entrepreneurs and their audiences draw upon. Our analysis shows how many social entrepreneurs mobilize a discursive repertoire that is familiar to their business-oriented audience while others predominantly draw on a social discourse. We identify separating, mixing, and combining as key strategies that allow social entrepreneurs to dance between the two. We discuss how the intertextual reproduction of concepts, objects, and subject positions contains both enabling and constraining elements, which results in an ethical dilemma for social entrepreneurs: Should they re-package their social impact story in a business discourse to connect with their audience?
Although behaving entrepreneurially has become increasingly important for many nonprofit organizations, research on entrepreneurial orientation (EO) lacks a clear understanding of the construct in ...the nonprofit context. This study examines how EO is shaped on the organizational level of a nonprofit organization and contributes to the creation of a social venture. With a qualitative research design, we explore the role of entrepreneurial elements manifested in the pre-start-up phase of social venture creation according to their importance for upstream and downstream processes. Our findings show how risk taking has a financial and a social dimension and we identify collaboration as a pivotal additional element for social EO along with proactiveness and innovativeness.
This study illuminates how a cross-sector social partnership legitimizes itself toward multiple internal and external stakeholders. Within a single-case study design, we collected retrospective and ...real time data on the partnership between Deutsche Post DHL and The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Within this partnership, Deutsche Post DHL provides corporate volunteers that support disaster response after natural disasters on a pro bono basis. The main objects that needed legitimacy as well as the audiences from which legitimacy was mainly sought changed over time. In addition, we identified legitimation work as occurring across objects, audiences, and time. Thus, we introduce legitimation work as the purposeful effort of the legitimacy seeker to avoid certain issues while ensuring other issues that are of importance to the conferrer of legitimacy. These findings contribute to micro-level considerations within institutional theory which view legitimacy as socially constructed between legitimacy seeker and conferrer. Hence, we add another perspective on legitimation to the previously existing conceptualizations of legitimacy as a deterministic consequence of institutionalization.
In this study, we develop a multi‐level theoretical framework linking antecedents and outcomes of peer control, defined as team members at the same hierarchical level noticing and responding to their ...peers’ behaviour or performance. Analysing multi‐level data from 356 volunteers and 58 regional teams in a non‐profit organization, we examine top‐down managerial controls as antecedents of lateral peer control, both directly (i.e., monitoring and responding directly to peers) and indirectly (i.e., gossiping about and avoiding underperforming peers), and peer control’s effects on individual‐ and team‐level outcomes. In line with our predictions, we find formal managerial control and clan control to be antecedents of peer control, albeit with differential effects on direct and indirect peer control. We also find a significant association between peer control and both individual‐level job satisfaction and team‐level performance, but again, with crucial differences between the two types of peer controls and the two outcomes. Our study contributes to the development of a better theoretical understanding of peer control, sheds light on inconsistent findings across prior studies, provides novel insights into how team leaders can influence team members’ individual satisfaction and team‐level performance via peer control, and reveals important trade‐offs with regards to peer control’s influence on individual‐ and team‐level outcomes.
Despite increasing interest in discontinuous organizations and new forms of work, our understanding of how iterative organizations achieve organizational identity consistency over time remains ...limited. On the basis of our analysis of the Disaster Response Teams organization, a corporate volunteering program of Deutsche Post DHL, we identify four organizational enablers fostering identity consistency that primarily occur during phases of dormancy: connecting organizational episodes, preparing organizational episodes, expanding organizational interaction, and alternative organizational interaction.
We illustrate the positive role of organizational growth through boundary expansion as well as the importance of emotionally intense experiences and future-orientation in achieving organizational identity consistency across single deployments in a corporate volunteering program. In addition, we point to the paradoxical role of discontinuity, which requires more intensive organizational identity work to bridge phases of dormancy but, at the same time, may represent a resource for identity work.
Despite demographic change leading to increased age diversity among volunteers, extant research offers limited guidance on how organizations can manage age-diverse volunteer teams. In this study, we ...delve into the dynamics of age diversity in a volunteer context by analyzing the case of German World Shops. We collected extensive ethnographic and interview data from age-diverse volunteer teams over a period of 2.5 years. In our analysis, we identified three overarching barriers to age-diverse teamwork—resistance to change and innovation, communication preferences, and power dynamics—and three enablers—creating space to experiment, ensuring protected spaces, and fostering spaces of encounter. In doing so, we contribute to the existing literature on diversity in volunteering and offer guidance for volunteer coordinators to foster collaboration and the build-up of relational capital among volunteers to create successful age-diverse volunteer teams. Moreover, this research opens avenues for further exploration into this emerging and critical phenomenon.
This study examines how institutional logics interplay in a cross-sector social partnership that manages refugee integration in a rural district in Germany. In an inductive 15-month case study that ...drew on interviews and observations, we observe the dynamic materialization of institutional logics in day-to-day practices and an increasing contradiction and even rivalry between community- and market-based institutional logics over time. As a result, we delineate a model explaining the interplay of institutional logics along two dimensions: the dominance of one salient logic and whether conflicts arise among logics. Our analysis also addresses the unifying properties of community as an institutional logic, especially in the context of urgency conditions. In addition, we show the influence of exogenous events and their media coverage on the interplay and conflicts of institutional logics. By unfolding the complexity of refugee integration—one of the global grand challenges of the present—we deepen the current understanding of the specific challenges addressed by cross-sector social partnerships.
Studies have shown that women’s professional networks are often less powerful and effective than men’s in terms of exchanged benefits, yet the motivations that underlie the networking behaviours ...remain less well understood. Based on an interview study of 37 high-profile female leaders working in large German corporations, we found that not only the extrinsic barrier of structural exclusion from powerful networks, but also the intrinsic barrier of women’s hesitations to instrumentalize social ties are key to answering our research question: Why do women build less effective networks than men? Our analysis points to the existence of structural exclusion resulting from work–family conflict and homophily. With regard to personal hesitation, we identified two elements that were associated with under-benefiting from networking: moral considerations in social interactions and gendered modesty. Our study makes two important contributions. First, by highlighting personal hesitation as an intrinsic barrier, it extends the understanding of women’s motivations for networking based on social exchange theory. Second, based on structural barriers and personal hesitation, it develops a grounded theory model of networking that offers a holistic understanding of reasons that, from the perspective of the focal women, contribute to gender inequality in the workplace.
This paper elucidates the political dynamics of organizational identity breach and reconstruction. Drawing on the revealing case of UNICEF Germany, we develop a process model of four phases of ...identity breach and reconstruction: build-up of identity tensions, revelation of identity breach, identity reconstruction, and enactment of the reconstructed identity. Our analysis explains how each phase was characterized by specific political strategies employed by the managerialist and idealist organizational members, the effects of these strategies on the power balance and consensus or conflict over organizational identity, and how particular triggers explain shifts from one phase to another. By so doing, our analysis advances our understanding of organizational identity breach and reconstruction as political processes, and paves the way for new studies of political identity dynamics in other contexts.
Autonomous vehicles are expected to disrupt mobility but face consumer reluctance. Diffused through carsharing services, the technology could become more accessible and overcome initial skepticism. ...Consequently, carsharing with shared autonomous vehicles (SAVs) can provide the combined benefits of autonomous driving technology and access-based consumption. Whereas first investigations into the topic provide projections in adoption preferences and first impacts, the literature lacks a holistic understanding of drivers, barriers, and future developments in carsharing with SAVs over the next ten years. We conducted a four-stage exploratory Delphi-study with 40 international experts to elicit these factors. Key findings include the strong perception of technological aspects, consumer acceptance considerations, and legislative concerns. Remarkably, the factors of sustainability and ethics were perceived as secondary. We conclude our paper with implications and recommendations for managers, policy makers, and future academic research.
•A four-stage Delphi study with 40 international experts involved in novel mobility services.•Examination of drivers, inhibitors and future developments of carsharing with shared autonomous vehicles•Technology, encompassing functionality and convenience, considered most important•Economic drivers, including demand and supply factors, received high ratings.•Sustainability and ethics were considered of minor importance.
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