 Expectations Meet Reality: Leader Sensemaking and Enactment of Stakeholder Engagement in Multistakeholder Social EnterprisesNevena Radoynovska
Post-Print from HAL Abstract: Given the urgency of global crises, interest abounds in alternative organizational forms (e.g., multistakeholder social enterprises, MSEs), promising structural solutions to engage diverse stakeholders in the creation of joint social, economic, and democratic values. Yet, studies of the who, how, and why of stakeholder engagement are predominantly rooted in for-profit contexts, assuming objective boundaries between insider/outsider stakeholders and engagement as a means to an end. The context of MSEs challenges both of these assumptions. Based on interviews with leaders of 28 French MSEs, I show how the latter made sense of their expectations versus the reality of stakeholder engagement. Leader sensemaking strategies informed the enactment of (revised) stakeholder engagement strategies to maintain coherence, or address misalignment, between expectations and reality. The article contributes to the literature by challenging assumptions of stakeholder engagement in for-profit firms. It also cautions against an overreliance on designated organizational forms to enable substantive stakeholder engagement. Keywords: France; leader sensemaking; multistakeholder social enterprise; social cooperative; stakeholder engagement (search for similar items in EconPapers) Published in Business and Society, inPress, 44 p There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04430742 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Post-Print from HAL |
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