Governing Inter‐Organizational Collaboration through Purpose Work and Purpose Borrowing: How Social Enterprises' Normative Aspirations Influence Business Partners' Practices

Ignas M. Bruder and Jörg Sydow

Journal of Management Studies, 2025, vol. 62, issue 6, 2207-2240

Abstract: Social enterprises may boost their impact by convincing collaborating businesses to contribute to their purposes. However, such enterprises typically lack the leverage to influence mainstream businesses. We investigate to what extent their abundant social resources might enable them to remedy this weakness to some extent. Taking a practice‐based perspective, we conduct an ethnographic case study of a social enterprise's collaborative relationships. We discover a collaboration process grounded in social purpose: If a social enterprise's underlying normative aspiration is to put ‘purpose before profit’ and it practices ‘purpose work’, its partners may conversely engage in ‘purpose borrowing’, which involves actions espousing the social enterprise's purpose even if they go against business common sense. We advance research on hybrid organizations by explaining how social enterprises can exert a significant degree of influence on their business partners thanks to their inherent social resources, which are more diverse and powerful than assumed so far. Furthermore, we contribute to inter‐organizational collaboration research by identifying a new mode of relational governance founded on social purpose that goes beyond the established modes based on legitimacy, trust, and reciprocity.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.13167

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jomstd:v:62:y:2025:i:6:p:2207-2240

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... s.asp?ref=00022-2380

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Management Studies is currently edited by Timothy Clark, Steven W. Floyd and Mike Wright

More articles in Journal of Management Studies from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().