Managing Value Tensions in Collective Social Entrepreneurship: The Role of Temporal, Structural, and Collaborative Compromise

Björn C. Mitzinneck () and Marya L. Besharov ()
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Björn C. Mitzinneck: University of Groningen
Marya L. Besharov: Cornell University Industrial and Labor Relations School

Journal of Business Ethics, 2019, vol. 159, issue 2, No 6, 400 pages

Abstract: Abstract Social entrepreneurship increasingly involves collective, voluntary organizing efforts where success depends on generating and sustaining members’ participation. To investigate how such participatory social ventures achieve member engagement in pluralistic institutional settings, we conducted a qualitative, inductive study of German Renewable Energy Source Cooperatives (RESCoops). Our findings show how value tensions emerge from differences in RESCoop members’ relative prioritization of community, environmental, and commercial logics, and how cooperative leaders manage these tensions and sustain member participation through temporal, structural, and collaborative compromise strategies. We unpack the mechanisms by which each strategy enables members to justify organizational decisions that violate their personal value priorities and demonstrate their varying implications for organizational growth. Our findings contribute new insights into the challenges of collective social entrepreneurship, the capacity of hybrid organizing strategies to mitigate value concessions, and the importance of logic combinability as a key dimension of pluralistic institutional settings.

Keywords: Hybrid organizing; Social enterprise; Cooperatives; Institutional pluralism; Values; Renewable energy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

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DOI: 10.1007/s10551-018-4048-2

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