Beyond collaboration: A pluralistic review of interorganizational relationships in social entrepreneurship

Abstract

This article explores the complexity of interorganizational relationships in social entrepreneurship. Although existing research has deepened our understanding of collaboration, there remains a need to examine the broader range of relationships social entrepreneurs navigate in practice. To address this issue, we adopt an ecosystem perspective, drawing on ecological systems thinking, to develop a typology of interorganizational relationships within the field of social entrepreneurship. Our systematic literature review of 221 peer-reviewed articles reveals a broad range of interorganizational relationships experienced by social entrepreneurs. Our findings highlight how social entrepreneurs engage with a diverse range of organizations through collaborative relationships, such as mutualism and commensalism, alongside more adversarial relationships, such as competition, parasitism, volatile relationships and coopetition. We differentiate between the antecedents, characteristics and outcomes of each type of relationship. We contribute to research on interorganizational relationships in social entrepreneurship by moving beyond the prevailing collaboration bias and offering a more balanced view of their diversity and outcomes. More broadly, we extend entrepreneurial ecosystem scholarship by showing how ecosystems shape relationship forms and outcomes and advance the ecological perspective by reframing categories as nature-based descriptors and showing the linkage between micro-level relationships and ecosystem-level dynamics.