Effectiveness of Social Enterprises: Aligning Strategies and Supply Chains for Impact
Abstract
Social enterprises use market mechanisms to address social issues that are undesirable targets for intervention by conventional businesses. The pursuit of these goals comes with inherent operational constraints that must be mitigated for the organization to survive, but that are unavoidable without compromising the organization’s social mission. However, the assumption embedded in much of the SCM literature, that profit maximization is the ultimate goal, may lead to the implementation of practices that are inappropriate or even detrimental for social enterprises. This dissertation aims to address this issue through an investigation into how a social enterprise’s social value creation strategy (SVCS) affects its supply chain structure and management, and how supply chain social capital can help organizations overcome operational constraints to achieve effectiveness.
This dissertation contains three components. First, a conceptual framework is developed that identifies the core components of an organization’s SVCS: its activity link, financial model and beneficiary characteristics. This framework is used to develop a set of propositions regarding how supply chain constraints associated with these strategies can be addressed through the development of different dimensions of social capital. Second, an fsQCA study is conducted to validate the propositions put forth from the conceptual framework and identify configurations of SVCSs and social capital that are necessary or sufficient for effectiveness. Finally, a multiple case study is presented to validate the suggested supply chain constraints presented in the conceptual framework (e.g., cost or design constraints, competitive constraints) and presents a more nuanced look at the underlying mechanisms through which social capital contributes to social enterprise effectiveness.
The findings of this dissertation suggest that different dimensions of social capital make crucial contributions to the effectiveness of social enterprises, and that the nature of these contributions varies based on the organization’s SVCS. This dissertation also identifies underlying mechanisms through which social capital contributes to social enterprise effectiveness. This work contributes to the SCM literature by highlighting the unique constraints faced by social enterprises and the supply chain adaptations implemented to mitigate them, highlighting the ways in which conventional SCM intuition is insufficient to appropriately guide the behaviour of social entrepreneurs.