Varieties of (Social) Entrepreneurship: Hybrid Organizational Forms, Community Embeddedness, and Evaluating the Promise(s) of Social Change

Radoynovska, Nevena

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-8avb-v542

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Varieties of (Social) Entrepreneurship: Hybrid Organizational Forms, Community Embeddedness, and Evaluating the Promise(s) of Social Change

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What is the role of entrepreneurship – a predominantly market-based approach – in addressing social problems such as inequality and social exclusion? How do entrepreneurial organizations with a distinctly social purpose (often referred to as hybrid organizations) manage additional imperatives, such as those related to democratic governance? Based on 70 interviews, archival analysis, and event-history analysis of 3551 hybrid organizations over 13 years, this dissertation examines two parallel models of “entrepreneurship for the social good” in France. Chapter 1 investigates a model of social entrepreneurship based on the profile and community context of the entrepreneur. Namely, it considers how entrepreneurs from the disadvantaged suburbs around Paris (banlieues) contribute to reducing social exclusion in their communities in ways both functional (e.g., facilitating the founding and network-building of new enterprises) and ideational (e.g., altering stereotypes and cultural perceptions of the banlieues). Chapters 2 and 3 focus on multi-stakeholder cooperatives for the public interest (SCICs) as a statutory model of social enterprise based on organizational form. Chapter 2 investigates the combination of community and organizational-level factors that contribute to the higher overall survival rate of SCICs compared to traditional cooperatives and comparable corporations. Chapter 3 complicates this optimistic view by uncovering organizational strategies for dealing with the additional demands of democratic governance and participation in such entrepreneurial ventures for the social good. Overall, the dissertation invites a rethinking of entrepreneurship as primarily focusing on standard practices of venture creation and growth, and of entrepreneurship’s role in social change as largely involving community economic development and job creation. Although enterprises founded in the banlieues and SCICs may not systematically scale or contribute to reducing unemployment, the multi-faceted forms that entrepreneurship does take in disadvantaged communities provide other valuable social change outcomes. Further, by studying market-based initiatives in the quintessential French welfare state the dissertation questions what it means for enterprise initiatives – and the government policies that increasingly promote them – to succeed or fail in their social, economic, and democratic missions. More broadly, the findings may prove useful to policy debates on what forms of entrepreneurship to support, in which contexts, and by what means, in order to achieve a range of social welfare outcomes.

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