Social Enterprises as Hybrid Organizations: A Review and Research Agenda

By Bob Doherty, H. Haugh, Fergus Lyon. 2014

1,587 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The impacts of the global economic crisis of 2008, the intractable problems of persistent poverty and environmental change have focused attention on organizations that combine enterprise with an embedded social purpose. Scholarly interest in social enterprise (SE) has progressed beyond the early focus on definitions and context to investigate their management and performance. From a review of the SE literature, the authors identify hybridity, the pursuit of the dual mission of financial sustainability and social purpose, as the defining characteristic of SEs. They assess the impact of hybridity on the management of the SE mission, financial resource acquisition and human resource mobilization, and present a framework for understanding the tensions and trade‐offs resulting from hybridity. By examining the influence of dual mission and conflicting institutional logics on SE management the authors suggest future research directions for theory development for SE and hybrid organizations more generally.

Subfields: Finance, Management of Technology and Innovation, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/480c6034950dc987d745f1db3203aafddc28bc14

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Citations in the corpus

Sustaining Inter-organizational Relationships Across Institutional Logics and Power Asymmetries: The Case of Fair Trade (2016, background): “…managed in a relatively stable way at the level of entire fields (Reay and Hinings 2009) or within ‘hybrid organizations’ (Battilana and Dorado 2010; Doherty et al. 2014; Pache and Santos 2013), the contributions of and sustaining factors behind inter-organizational relationships in this process…”
Social Enterprise – A New Phenomenon in the Field of Economic and Social Welfare? (2015, background): “These new alternative organizational spaces are seen as blurring deep-rooted distinctions between the private, public and third sectors and, therefore, are difficult to categorize through the use of traditional conceptual lens (Billis 2010; Doherty et al. 2014).”
Social entrepreneurship research: A review and future research agenda (2020, background): “Doherty et al. (2014) suggested that social enterprises should generate social returns at the cost of financial return on investment and dual pricing strategies.”
A Fair Trade-off? Paradoxes in the Governance of Fair-trade Social Enterprises (2016, background): “However, unlike other organizations, social enterprises perform a particular blend of hybridity (between social goals and entrepreneurial means) and these competing logics appear to influence managerial tensions and challenges, particularly in the areas of mission, finance and management of people (”
Achieving Shared Triple Bottom Line (TBL) Value Creation: Toward a Social Resource-Based View (SRBV) of the Firm (2018, background): “First, hybrid businesses have combined economic and social goals but the combination must be economically viable (Battilana and Lee 2014).3 Next, social businesses are a hybrid organizational form4 with structures and practices adopted from other types of organizations (Doherty et al. 2014).”
Social procurement in UK construction projects (2016, background): “While there has been considerable debate about the defining characteristic of social enterprise, in its simplest terms, it is the blending of a commitment to resolve social issues with commercial enterprise (Doherty et al., 2014).”
Social finance and crowdfunding for social enterprises: a public–private case study providing legitimacy and leverage (2014, background): “As Doherty, Haugh, and Lyon (2014) examine: ‘scholarly interest in social enterprise (SE) has progressed beyond the early focus on definitions and context to investigate their management and performance’.”
A Social Enterprise Approach to Empowering Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Indonesia (2020, background): “Social enterprises are, therefore, different from private sector organizations, which are profit-oriented; their program priorities are wealth creation or other social activities, such as poverty reduction and solving inequality, homelessness, and unemployment [25].”
Social mission as competitive advantage: A configurational analysis of the strategic conditions of social entrepreneurship (2019, background): “Doherty et al. (2014), following the work of Dacin, Dacin, and Matear (2010), offer a similar criticism of the social and economic dichotomy in hybrid ventures and how this relates to competitive advantage, calling for further theoretical development and empirical insights.”
An empirical analysis of the factors affecting social entrepreneurial intentions (2017, background): “Social entrepreneurship starts on comprehending a social opportunity, then passes it on into an enterprise model, amasses the necessary resources for execution, gives life to and nurtures the enterprise and eventually reaches the intended destination (Doherty et al. 2014).”
Mapping the Intellectual Structure of Social Entrepreneurship Research: A Citation/Co-citation Analysis (2019, neutral): “Second, some studies have highlighted the need to examine additional areas of social entrepreneurship, such as resource mobilization challenges (Austin et al. 2006; Certo and Miller 2008; Doherty et al. 2014; Haugh 2005), characteristics of social entrepreneurs (Certo and Miller 2008; Choi and Majum”
Market orientation, market disruptiveness capability and social enterprise performance: An empirical study from the United Kingdom (2019, background): “Second, as this definition bridges the European and American definitions of social enterprise (Doherty et al., 2014), its adoption may widen the scope and applicability of this study.”
Social Entrepreneurial Intention and the Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic: A Structural Model (2020, background): “This concept of sustainability refers to the intention to maintain social activity over time, which, in turn, requires generating business activity with the aim of guaranteeing financial sustainability [26].”