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Despite the increase in empirical studies of social enterprise in management and organization research, the lack of a cohesive knowledge base in this area is concerning. In this chapter, we propose that the underdevelopment of the attendant research infrastructure is an important, but oft-overlooked, barrier to the development of this body of empirical research.

We explore this proposition through a review of 55 empirical studies of social enterprises published in the last fifteen years, in which we examine the mix and trajectory of research methods used and the research infrastructure on which these studies depend.

We find that empirical research has used social enterprise largely as a context for theory development, rather than deductively testing, and thus building upon, existing theories. The latter pattern is due largely to the absence of two key dimensions of infrastructure: well-defined samples, and consistent, operational measures of social enterprise success. Finally, we identify present trends along both dimensions that contribute to changing the research infrastructure for empirical social enterprise research.

Our analysis highlights the critical need for research infrastructure to advance empirical research on social enterprise. From this perspective, research infrastructure-building provides an important opportunity for researchers interested in social enterprise and others interested in enabling high-quality empirical research in this setting.

We consider how the commercialization of social ventures may result from their founders’ personal experiences of commercial organizing. Building on theories of individual imprinting, we theorize that the commercialization of social ventures is influenced by two types of commercial experience: parental imprinting from the commercial work experience of a founder’s parents, and work imprinting from a founder’s professional experience within for-profit organizations. We find support for our theory based on analysis of a novel dataset of over 2,000 nascent social ventures and their founders. We further find that the marginal effects of additional work imprinting from a founder’s commercial experience decline with the longevity of this experience. We discuss implications of our findings for literatures on social ventures, imprinting, and hybrid organizations.

This chapter identifies assumptions, conceptual issues and challenges in the literature on hybrid organizations that draws on the institutional logics perspective. The authors build on the existing literature reviews as well as on an analysis of the 10 most cited and 10 most recently published articles at the intersection of hybrid organizations and institutional logics. The authors further draw from the literature on theory construction and theory development and growth to strengthen our analysis of this body of work and reflect upon future theoretical developments. From this analysis, the authors highlight four challenges to current research on organizational hybridity with an institutional logics lens and develop four suggestions to inspire future research. In doing so, they aim at seeding a more nuanced use of the institutional logics perspective and thereby foster the development of innovative and cumulative theory and empirical research on organizational hybridity.

Social enterprise organizations (SEOs) arise from entrepreneurial activities with the aim to achieve social goals. SEOs have been identified as alternative and/or complementary to the actions of governments and international organizations to address poverty and poverty-related social needs. Using a number of illustrative cases, we explore how variation of local institutional mechanisms shapes the local “face of poverty” in different communities and how this relates to variations in the emergence and strategic orientations of SEOs. We develop a model of the productive opportunity space for SEOs as a basis and an inspiration for further scholarly inquiry.

This chapter argues that a structural change is occurring in the relationships among the State and the society, opening up new opportunities for co-creating public value. In particular, four alternative patterns are proposed: resistance (no change); outsourcing; layering; strategic reconnection. The strategic reconnection alternative is the one grounded on public value co-creation as a new paradigm for public management and as a new ethos for public managers. The chapter highlights how several strategic management schools (Ferlie & Ongaro, 2015) may inform the design and the management of processes of public value co-creation. Finally, it highlights the role of civicness as a principle of democratic governance, as a philosophical premise for human agency towards public value co-creation and as the seed animating what it is defined in the chapter as the ‘public value society’.

This paper aims to reflect on 25 years of the social enterprise initiative at the Harvard Business School, examining the processes and thinking involved at key stages of this pioneering Initiative’s implementation and institutionalization.

The authors adopt an auto-ethnographical approach, reflexively considering the impact of our actions at key stages.

Reflecting on the experiences, the authors offer their thoughts on the challenges involved in establishing an educational program. They consider that there were give stages in the development of the program, which ensured its longevity, institutionalization and success: giving birth; starting an experiment; gaining acceptability; being embraced and achieving irreversibility.

The multiple challenges faced, as well as the successes that the authors had over the years, are set out. Awareness of the challenges that the authors faced will support educators to be prepared to overcome the same or similar challenges to implementing and embedding a social enterprise program.

This is the first time that the authors’ reflections on the history of the Social Enterprise Initiative have been brought together. As well as distinctive in their own right, the authors consider that the lessons learned from the work over such a long period could provide valuable insights to those who wish to integrate social enterprise teaching into their settings.