Organizational Mechanisms of Inclusive Growth: A Critical Realist Perspective on Scaling

Abstract

We investigate the challenge how the outcomes of innovation for inclusive growth, the novel organizational recipes, can be scaled to match the dimension of poverty. We conceptualize scaling as sustained event regularities between doing A and expected outcomes B. Building on a critical realist perspective, we develop an analytical framework of organizational closure and apply it to an extreme case, an organization with an inclusive growth model that has sustained event regularities for more than two decades. Our analysis reveals closure as an organizational competence with important implications for achieving scale in the context of poverty. We develop of a number of propositions between the link of organizational closure and scaling with implications for practice and further academic research.