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For Purpose Enterprises and Hybrid Organizational Forms: Implications for Governance and Strategy

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dc.contributor.authorPasquini, Martina
dc.contributor.authorGiarratana, Marco
dc.contributor.rorhttps://ror.org/02jjdwm75
dc.date.accessioned2025-06-25T08:46:25Z
dc.date.available2025-06-25T08:46:25Z
dc.date.issued2023-09-20
dc.description.abstractNowadays, a company’s social purpose has become a key factor that should be considered in organisational design and strategic decision-making. For-purpose enterprises are for-profit, financially self-sustained organisations, which embed a social aim as one of their main objectives. Companies that simultaneously must envisage a double purpose, namely, social and competitive, face an even greater complexity, i.e., a likely risk of internal logics’ tensions and structural drifts. Scholars have proposed different theoretical and operative frameworks; on the one hand, they describe ad hoc business models to foster synergies between the social impact and economic and competitive-oriented actions. On the other hand, they also try to focus on an organization’s governance, suggesting incentive schemes and organizational designs that could smooth trade-offs and tensions, which could jeopardize a company’s viability. This piece aims at building a comprehensive overview of the studies that, in different fields, have contributed to the understanding of businesses with purposes under different angles. Following Mitnick et al. (2021), scholars have differentiated two clusters of studies: i) instrumental–strategic–economic stream; ii) injunctive–social–behavioural. The first approach perceives as critical the balance between social-oriented aims and profit with a viable business model. Under this perspective, the concept of synergies between the two aims is critical. Its mainstream framework is the stakeholder theory approach, while recent approaches, rooted especially in marketing and strategic human capital studies, bring to the central stage how corporate social responsible actions develop social identity processes with focal stakeholders, which are responsible for reciprocity behaviours. These different perspectives, although complementary, could imply significant differences for the organisation design, product strategy, and the role and power of the chief sustainability officer as well as allocation of resources and capabilities. The second group of studies, i.e., injunctive–social–behavioural, is focused on understanding how to maintain active social aims under economic and competitive constrains. These works are particularly focused in investigating the intrinsic motivations of doing good and the type of tensions that could arise in organizations with a social mission. The works thus analyse the potential drifts, risks, and solutions that could mitigate tension and trade-offs. In this stream, the first line of work is related to social entrepreneurship, especially in developing countries, while the second is more focused on human resource incentive schemes and organizational designs that preserve a company’s social goals under economic constrains. In sum, providing a general and actualized map of the research related to for-purpose enterprises, this article aims to highlight the focal points of investigation that could generate new management theory developments.
dc.description.peerreviewedyes
dc.description.statusPublished
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dc.identifier.citationGiarratana, M. S., & Pasquini, M. (2023). For-Purpose Enterprises and Hybrid Organizational Forms: Implications for Governance and Strategy. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Business and Management. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190224851.013.413
dc.identifier.doihttps://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190224851.013.413
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14417/3812
dc.journal.titleOxford Research Encyclopedia of Business and Management
dc.language.isoen
dc.page.total34
dc.relation.departmentStrategy
dc.relation.entityIE University
dc.relation.schoolIE Business School
dc.rightsAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
dc.rights.accessRightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/deed.en
dc.subject.keywordHybridity
dc.subject.keywordSocial Goals
dc.subject.keywordProfits
dc.subject.keywordBusiness Models
dc.subject.keywordSynergy
dc.subject.keywordSocial Entrepreneurship
dc.subject.keywordStakeholders
dc.subject.keywordSocial Responsibility
dc.titleFor Purpose Enterprises and Hybrid Organizational Forms: Implications for Governance and Strategy
dc.typeinfo:eu-repo/semantics/article
dc.version.typeinfo:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion
dspace.entity.typePublication
relation.isAuthorOfPublication12109eb9-bcb9-4afb-a669-131aac6e0e90
relation.isAuthorOfPublicatione9508b29-b78b-4aa3-9560-d71aa11f6ee6
relation.isAuthorOfPublication.latestForDiscovery12109eb9-bcb9-4afb-a669-131aac6e0e90
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