Governing Inter-Organizational Collaboration through Purpose Work and Purpose Borrowing: How Social Enterprises' Normative Aspirations Influence Business Partners' Practices

Abstract

Social enterprises may boost their impact by convincing collaborating businesses to contribute to their purposes. However, such enterprises typically lack the leverage to influence mainstream businesses. We investigate to what extent their abundant social resources might enable them to remedy this weakness to some extent. Taking a practice-based perspective, we conduct an ethnographic case study of a social enterprise's collaborative relationships. We discover a collaboration process grounded in social purpose: If a social enterprise's underlying normative aspiration is to put ‘purpose before profit’ and it practices ‘purpose work’, its partners may conversely engage in ‘purpose borrowing’, which involves actions espousing the social enterprise's purpose even if they go against business common sense. We advance research on hybrid organizations by explaining how social enterprises can exert a significant degree of influence on their business partners thanks to their inherent social resources, which are more diverse and powerful than assumed so far. Furthermore, we contribute to inter-organizational collaboration research by identifying a new mode of relational governance founded on social purpose that goes beyond the established modes based on legitimacy, trust, and reciprocity.