The Re-Enchantment of Collegiality as a Governance Practice for Social Enterprises

Abstract

In this working paper, we explore the re-enchantment of collegiality as a deviating form of organizational governance practice that contradicts the predominant institutional logic of teleological organizational rationalization in a capitalist system. We seek to understand when and how collegiality governance practices can be integrated into an organizational context and develop a neo-collegial framework for social enterprises. Using an institutional theory approach, we couple a post-Weberian understanding of the collegiality concept with social entrepreneurship and organizational governance research. Derived from empirical investigations in two case organizations, we found that a re-enchantment of collegiality in a social enterprise context requires a certain set of collegiality governance enablers on the micro, meso, and macro level, that allow for a transcendence of traditional collegiality principles from the political and institutional sphere into the organizational context of social enterprises.