Abstract
This paper aims to explore how differently corporate enterprises and social enterprises strategically position themselves through their mission statements. The most notable distinctions between the mission statements of both groups exist in the degree of action orientation, endorsements of people/groups, and the highlights of positive entailment. The new and renewable energy sector is playing a key role in the emergence of India as an environmentally conscious emerging economy. The enterprises instrumental in this change are both social and corporate enterprises. While technology is important, a key factor to success is strategic approach. The vision and mission statements are strategically crafted by organizations to position themselves in the industry. This motivated the authors to carry out a comparative analysis of the mission statements of social and corporate enterprises to learn about the existing differences. Efforts were employed to quantify the narrative style and tonality of mission statements by applying DICTION software. This process generated values for the ‘master variables’ and ‘calculated variables’ in mission statements. Content analysis revealed that while a significant number of enterprises scored zero for the calculated variable ‘insistence’, only a few had scores within range. Most enterprises scored considerably well in the master variable ‘activity’. In ‘optimism’ social and corporate enterprises show some noticeable differences in their purpose, which reflect how different these organizations are. This content analysis succeeds in reflecting where the social and corporate enterprises in India’s renewable energy sector differ in their strategic intent. While in renewable energy social enterprises there is a domination of reference to beneficiaries/communities in their mission statements, and the positive entailments in terms of social change; renewable energy corporate enterprises seem to have a stronger intent to focus on issues related to technology, innovation, efficiency, and cost-leadership. Thus, this paper not only adds to establishing the fact that mission statements do play an important role in reflecting the strategic purpose of the organization, but adds to the arguments on the difference between social and commercial entrepreneurship.
Highlights
India, being the second largest emerging economy in India, has been bolstering entrepreneurship and expansion of businesses (Gubbi 2010)
No consolidated list of social enterprises exists on government records; which is understandable in an emerging economy like India which has not legally defined ‘social enterprises’
The limitation that the authors had in choosing of enterprises for study was that they were not able to segregate the lists of empanelled agencies with the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy; primarily due to the lack of classification between social enterprises and corporate enterprises in the list of empanelment, and absence of some social enterprises in those very lists
Summary
India, being the second largest emerging economy in India, has been bolstering entrepreneurship and expansion of businesses (Gubbi 2010). It is estimated that by 2030, the Indian and Chinese middle class would be party to 23 and 18% respectively of global consumption, with the United States taking the third position of only 7% (Kharas 2011) These BRIC countries ranked highest in opportunity index developed by Grant Thornton in Thornton 2012. Some of the common traits that can be observed to be common to all emerging economies are inconsistency and lack of clarity on policies, issues related to governance, underdeveloped institutions, lack of funding options for public as well as private projects, cultural complexities, lack of a promising education system, reluctance in internationalization, and personalized networks (Manimala & Wasdani, 2015) These shortcomings have considerable impact on entrepreneurial pursuits, thereby creating constraints in their effort for inception and subsequent scale up. Overcoming these constraints secure a relatively higher prominent position in the entrepreneurial agenda, in comparison to designing innovation and bringing disruption. Manimala and Wasdani (2015) appropriately remark that enterprises in emerging economies “tend to develop a style of muddling through toward venture creation and growth”
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