Abstract

Managing relationships with all the stakeholders is a central issue in Social Enterprises' management; these enterprises, operating across the faded boundary between for profit and not for profit sectors, overcome having limit scarce resources dotation trough relationships with other organizations in order to reach success in the society.
 
 In our paper, we have studied the capability of this class of enterprises to create and sustain relationships on the basis of the concepts and principles of Stakeholder Theory, that according enterprises' survival capacity is linked to their manage ability those actors that affects or are affected by enterprise actions in their decision-making. Our empirical studies have focused on the social network, defined trough a snowballing process (degree = 3), insisting on a Social Cooperative in Naples with two world shops and one wholesale warehouse. 
 
 Each node in the Social Cooperative's egonetwork has been tested for two classical measures of Social Network Analysis (Wasserman & Faust, 1994; Scott, 1991): centrality and proximity. These tests have been later used to compare actors and to analyze if more central or more homophilous actors, those who share similar interests, are better able to influence the social cooperative.
 
 Our paper highlights that homophily can better explain stakeholders' effects on the outcomes of strategic decision-making processes.

Highlights

  • 1.1 Background of the ProblemModern business can be seen as complex system, unstable and mutable, in which the players are usually forced to create, sustain and develop a great number of heterogeneous relationships with other classes of actors operating in the external environment

  • We studied the Social Cooperative E' Pappici a social enterprise based in Naples; it operates two world shops in the retail market and a regional warehouse for wholesale distribution of Fair-Trade products to the several hundreds of social organizations too small or inexperienced to manage a direct commercial relationship with national importers; the regional warehouse is the key element in our research because it facilitates this social cooperative in creating new relationships

  • The second hypothesis asked to identify the elements of the homophiles class; we have highlighted this characteristic comparing the social missions provided by each single nodes with the key elements of the one given us by social cooperative “E' Pappici”: sensitization to the territory, international cooperation, critical consumption, alternative lifestyles

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Summary

Introduction

Modern business can be seen as complex system, unstable and mutable, in which the players are usually forced to create, sustain and develop a great number of heterogeneous relationships with other classes of actors operating in the external environment These players usually depend on these relationships to get access to several meaningful resources needed to carry on their day to day operations (Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978), to survive in the business and to obtain a sustainable competitive advantage (Dyer & Singh, 1998; Gulati, 1998; Sciarelli, Tani, Landi & Papaluca, 2019). The urge to broaden conventional enterprise's responsibilities to encompass more “social” aspects is hindered by management's need to acknowledge a higher priority to economic interests (Drucker, 1974; Langtry, 2015), but there is subject that should be naturally less inclined to fall in the “separation fallacy” trap: social enterprises (Borzaga & Defourny, 2001; Defourny & Nyssens, 2008; Yunus, 2008)

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