Historia, estructura de la red, nodos, acciones y estrategias

Apart from their connection to the literature on social problems, social enterprises have been the object of numerous other research topics. This following section will provide a brief overview of the knowledge gathered around the activity of social enterprises.

Social entrepreneurship is more of an “umbrella construct” (Mair and Marti, 2004;

Battilana and Lee, 2014) with different levels of legitimacy in different countries. The social enterprise label has increased in popularity in the 1980s and 1990s and there are currently various definitions for the phenomenon (Mair and Marti, 2004; Battilana and Lee, 2014).

The difficulty of defining social entrepreneurship has been explicitly described in the literature (Mair, 2010; Doherty et al., 2014) and stems from the concept basically incorporating other several types of phenomena: social innovation (Alvord et al., 2004;

Phills et al., 2008) and community entrepreneurship (Peredo and Chrisman, 2006;

Johannisson and Nilsson, 1989), institutional entrepreneurship (Mair and Marti, 2009) and social ventures (Dorado, 2006; Sharir and Lerner, 2006). These phenomena are being looked into under the umbrella of the social entrepreneurship concept (Mair, 2010), which makes it mean “different things to different people” (Mair, 2010: 16).

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While some authors see social entrepreneurship as a process through which innovative solutions are used to cater to local basic needs not covered by traditional actors (Mair, 2010; Bornstein, 2007), a lot of research starts from a more organizational perspective in defining social enterprises. They are thus analyzed as being organizations that pursue social goals by using commercial revenue-generating activities, which makes them hybrid organizations (Mair and Marti, 2006; Doherty et al., 2014; Kerlin, 2010;

Ebrahim et al., 2014; Battilana and Lee, 2014). This definition will also be employed in the current study.

Although acknowledging that “the term ‘social enterprise’ has often been used to re-label organizational features that have already been well studied by existing academic literatures and thus may not belong in a distinctive organizational category” (Battilana and Lee, 2014: 408), some authors focus on organizations where the social and commercial activities of the organizations are both part of the core activities of the organizations (Thompson, 1967) and not on organizations where either one of these components is peripheral to the organization and has been thus covered by non-profit literature or CSR literature (Battilana and Lee, 2014). As we have seen in the previous section on hybrid organizing, other authors have a more fluid understanding of hybrids and thus of what kind of organizations can be analyzed as social enterprises (Grohs, 2014).

The way social enterprises are being defined and dealt with strongly depends on the local context in which they are active (Mair et al., 2012; Mair, 2010; Kerlin, 2010;

Kerlin, 2013; Seelos et al., 2011). This is a result of them operating in very different economies – liberal, cooperative, informative (Mair, 2010: 21) but also in different institutional settings (Kerlin, 2010; Kerlin, 2013). This affects the legal forms that social enterprises take up (Mair, 2010). At the same time though, the boundaries between particular social enterprise models typical for different countries, regions and economic models are also becoming more blurry (Mair, 2010) which shows that that there is also a cross-border process of diffusion of these organizational forms.

Kerlin (2013) elaborates on the institutional settings – culture, welfare state models, the economy, civil society models – that contribute to different developments of social entrepreneurship based on different needs and contexts, while using different countries

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as cases studies to exemplify the different approaches. The explanation draws back to the social origins theory, which argues that existing social institutions have an effect on the possibilities of other institutions emerging (Salamon et al., 2000). This variety of organizational forms has generated differentiation of social enterprises on a hybrid scale ranging from a typical non-profit orientation to a typical for-profit one.

Focusing rather on the organizational dimension and less on the institutional one, Lee (2014: 6) offers an overview of how social organizations have gradually developed business activities as a result of multiple regulatory, cultural and macroeconomic changes throughout time. The pro-business social attitudes, the reduction in public funding for social services and limited charitable funds available for private social service providers, as well as more job mobility between sectors have all contributed to social ventures adopting businesses practices to different degrees and therefore to the development of social enterprises as hybrid organizational forms.

A key issue when looking at social entrepreneurship is that the concept relies to a large extent on the support coming from practitioners who keep developing such organizations (Mair, 2010:18). Practitioners are also the ones “engaged in shaping the meaning of social entrepreneurship” (Mair, 2010: 18), as well as in guiding the development of the field. It is only natural therefore to have a strong empirical focus when analyzing social enterprises.

The analysis of various characteristics of social enterprises has contributed to generating typologies for these organizations. Building on the hybridity perspective, Mair et al.

(2015) distinguish between conforming hybrids focusing on one institutional logic and dissenting hybrids using selective coupling, innovation and defiance to deal with more institutional logics (Thornton and Ocasio, 2008). Furthermore, genuine hybrids are the ones that actually internalize the multiple core orientations of the organization, while symbolic hybrids simply make use of the social enterprise label in order to increase their legitimacy and access to resources (Mair et al., 2015). Ebrahim, Battilana and Mair (2014) also distinguish between differentiated and integrated hybrids. More specifically, integrated hybrids have both the commercial and socially focused activities overlapping at the core of the organization, transforming beneficiaries into clients (for instance, microfinance organizations). Differentiated hybrids separate these two streams of

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activities, the clients for the commercial activities being a different group than their beneficiaries. This typology is of importance when discussing the case study organizations in the paper which are all differentiated hybrids.

Research related to social enterprises revolves around a variety of topics. Looking at social enterprises from an organizational perspective and focusing on their hybridity, there has been much discussion about the tension between social and commercial purposes in social enterprises (Battilana et al., 2012; Mair and Marti, 2006; Pache and Santos, 2013). Approaching them from the perspective of institutional logics, scholars have been discussing the potential of mission drift of social enterprises as a result of these competing logics (Ebrahim et al., 2014; Spear et al., 2009). Other researchers have distinguished between different operational models that social enterprises employ (Alter, 2007), have developed typologies of social enterprises (Kerlin, 2010; Mair et al., 2012) based also on the institutional factors characterizing their environments (Kerlin, 2013), and have evaluated the social impact and performance of social enterprises (Ebrahim and Rangan, 2014), etc.

As a result of combining different processes, structures and meanings, social enterprises are facing tensions in their activity as result of their dual social and commercial focus.

Smith et al. (2013) identify performing tensions (which goals are more important), organizing tensions (as a results of structure, practices, culture, processes), belonging tensions (different identity groups) and learning tensions (different time horizons for growth and change). These can have an internal nature and influence the way the organization develops and functions (Battilana et al., 2012; Mair and Marti, 2006; Pache and Santos, 2013; Battilana and Lee, 2014) but they also play a role in the way the organization interacts with its external environment (Battilana and Lee, 2014).

There has been a focus in the literature on the internal strategies that social enterprises – studied as hybrid organizations - can adopt in order to deal with these tensions. Starting from the fact that social ventures that incorporate business aspects in their activity are less successful in achieving entrepreneurial milestones than social ventures that do not, Lee (2014) argues that the solution for organizations is to focus on practice integration which advances both commercial and social goals simultaneously. The issue of practice integration appears also in the case of work integration social enterprises (WISEs)

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where organizations that provide negotiation spaces for the groups working with the different social and commercial issues in the organization are performing better in regard to their social goal (Battilana et al., 2015).

The tensions social enterprises experience can also have an external impact.

Organizations become legitimate when they fulfill certain institutional expectations and complying with them translates into an easier access to acquiring resources (Kraatz and Block, 2008). The legal incorporation of the organizations is part of this legitimacy acquiring process, for instance. However, hybridity can hinder organizations from getting the resources they need because the resource providers see how there could be internal and external pressures for their performance as a result of them being hybrids.

For example, hybridity can generate conflict between different groups in the organization as a result of their different identities or incumbents could see social enterprises as challengers and respond aggressively towards them. This idea is supported by Lee (2014) who argues that social ventures with business practices attract less external funding than traditional charities because it is more difficult for funders to clearly understand who these organizations are and how they operate.

However, Smith et al. (2013) state that social and commercial tensions are not the only competing demands for organizations – others are related to global-local needs, stability and change, exploration and exploitation. This highlights the need for a more extended understanding of the type of pressures that social enterprises are subject to which goes beyond the focus on two competing logics. As hybrids, organizations can be a combination of more than two elements and the relationships between these elements can be very complex (Battilana et al., 2017).

There is a need therefore for a more nuanced understanding of social enterprises that goes beyond the dual social-commercial discussion. Social enterprises are complex organizational forms that are under the influence of multiple internal and external forces shaping their activity and development. As previous studies have shown, the institutional context in which social enterprises operate is in itself essential for a clearer understanding of these organizations. This study aims to address exactly this aspect in which the way social enterprises strategize in their highly institutionalized environments goes beyond the way in which they relate to or adopt competing logics or the way in

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which they combine social and commercial activities. The view is being broadened also based on the position of social enterprises as smaller, new entrants in the field that experience a multitude of institutional conditions differently from bigger, more established organizations. The tensions, pressures and opportunities they face in these circumstances require them to undergo particular strategizing processes that go beyond managing social and commercial activities.