Blurring the Boundaries: The Interplay of Gender and Local Communities in the Commercialization of Social Ventures

Stefan Dimitriadis (), Matthew Lee (), Lakshmi Ramarajan () and Julie Battilana ()
Additional contact information
Stefan Dimitriadis: Organizational Behavior Unit, Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts 02163
Matthew Lee: Strategy Unit, INSEAD, Singapore 138676
Lakshmi Ramarajan: Organizational Behavior Unit, Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts 02163
Julie Battilana: Organizational Behavior Unit, Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts 02163

Organization Science, 2017, vol. 28, issue 5, 819-839

Abstract: This paper examines the critical role of gender in the commercialization of social ventures. We argue that cultural beliefs about what is perceived to be appropriate work for each gender influence how founders of social ventures incorporate commercial activity into their ventures. Specifically, we argue and show that although cultural beliefs that disassociate women from commercial activity may result in female social venture founders being less likely to use commercial activity than their male counterparts, these effects are moderated by cultural beliefs about gender and commercial activity within founders’ local communities. The presence of female business owners in the same community mitigates the role of founders’ gender on the use of commercial activity. We examine these issues through a novel sample of 584 social ventures in the United States. We constructively replicate and extend these findings with a supplemental analysis of a second sample, the full population of new nonprofit organizations founded during a two-year period in the United States ( n = 31,160). By highlighting how gendered aspects of both the social and commercial sectors interact to shape the use of commercial activity by social venture founders, our findings contribute to research on hybrid organizations in the social sector, communities as a context for the enactment of gender, and the enactment of gender in entrepreneurship.

Keywords: social venture; gender; community; commercialization; cultural beliefs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2017.1144 (application/pdf)

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:inm:ororsc:v:28:y:2017:i:5:p:819-839

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Organization Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().