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.
Highlights
Extant research on social entrepreneurship tends to focus on formal employment organizations that pursue social missions through commercial ventures (Smith et al 2013; Battilana and Lee 2014; Battilana et al 2017)
This commitment featured prominently in RESCoops’ promotional materials and websites, as illustrated in Case 2: The [RESCoop] aims to offer citizens of the region an opportunity to actively contribute to a sustainable and decentralized energy supply by participating in our venture. This citizen activism will directly contribute to a climate and energy future that will protect the environment for future generations, develop our region, and benefit local inhabitants by allowing them to share in value creation. [Website, Case 2]
Social entrepreneurship frequently involves collective, voluntary organizing efforts little research to date has examined the challenges involved in such initiatives or strategies for managing them
Summary
Extant research on social entrepreneurship tends to focus on formal employment organizations that pursue social missions through commercial ventures (Smith et al 2013; Battilana and Lee 2014; Battilana et al 2017). Many forms of social entrepreneurship involve collective organizing efforts that depend on voluntary participation rather than formal employment and that pursue a triple rather than double bottom line. Despite the importance of collective, voluntary forms of social entrepreneurship, extant research offers limited insight into the challenges involved and how to manage them. Voluntary organizing initiatives often have few formal employees and must instead work to gain and sustain the participation of members who are not dependent on the organization. Collectivist organizations, and communities highlights the importance of sustaining member participation for long-term success
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