Paradoxes of Belonging, Organizing, and Agency: Integrating and Differentiating Divergent Strategic Logics in Supported Social Enterprises

Abstract

ABSTRACT Supported social enterprises (SSEs) are organizations that rely on both public subsidies and commercial activities to support underserved individuals’ social and economic integrations. As such, SSEs must manage paradoxes embedded in their double-bottom line that binds market and welfare logics. Having to pass through such authoritative and discordant filters, SSEs are inevitably compelled to vacillate between risky alignment strategies. Deploying an SSE serving immigrant women in the U.S. Southwest as a case study, this study takes a critical discourse approach to examine cross-status articulations of organizational identities, ideologies, and paradoxes underlying the work of the focal SSE. Interview discourses revealed how members of the SSE experience and respond to paradoxes of belonging, organizing, and institutional embeddedness stemming from employee profiles, workfare programs, and ideological contestations, respectively. Because the identified paradoxes are inherent in the work of SSEs, this study proposes integration and differentiation as flexible yet complementary entrepreneurial communication strategies for managing paradoxes and divergent logics. Additionally, integration and differentiation can help SSEs foster cross-status awareness and commitment to both social and business missions that are crucial in the processes of revamping legitimacy among SSEs stakeholders.