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Lyon, Fergus and Blundel, Richard
(2012).
URL: http://secolloquium2012.weebly.com/index.html
Abstract
Research on social entrepreneurship has emphasised the need to examine the scaling and replicability of social innovations and associated business models. Social ventures play a critical mediating role in constructing these models in order to deliver specific innovations. However, little consideration has been given to the long-term growth of social ventures as organizational forms. This gap in our understanding has been filled by generalised assumptions, which may not reflect the inherent variety and complexity of the underlying processes. The main aim of the paper is to develop a methodology that is capable of supporting more historically-informed empirical work on the growth of social ventures. The argument is elaborated through a critical review of relevant literatures and a comparative analysis of the growth of two social ventures located in the United Kingdom. The paper demonstrates how analytically structured historical narratives can be used to conduct more nuanced, multi-level studies of organizational growth over extended periods. In doing so, it contributes to our appreciation of context-specific interactions, including the renegotiation of founding visions, the joint pursuit of social and economic opportunities and transitions to new forms of governance. It also relates these organization-level dynamics to the broader challenge facing social enterprises as they negotiate operating environments that are characterised by changing societal norms, economic turbulence, policy and regulatory innovation and the marketisation of public services.
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About
- Item ORO ID
- 40765
- Item Type
- Conference or Workshop Item
- Project Funding Details
-
Funded Project Name Project ID Funding Body Not Set Not Set ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) Not Set Not Set Office for Civil Society (OCS) Not Set Not Set Barrow Cadbury UK Trust - Extra Information
- A substantially revised and updated version of this paper has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Social Entrepreneurship (http://oro.open.ac.uk/40762/)
- Keywords
- social entrepreneurship; social ventures; growth process; scaling; replicability; historical methods
- Academic Unit or School
-
Faculty of Business and Law (FBL) > Business > Department for Public Leadership and Social Enterprise
Faculty of Business and Law (FBL) > Business
Faculty of Business and Law (FBL) - Research Group
- Innovation, Knowledge & Development research centre (IKD)
- Copyright Holders
- © 2012 The Authors
- Related URLs
-
- http://oro.open.ac.uk/40762/(Publication)
- Depositing User
- Richard Blundel