Doctoral Dissertation Research: Profit and Philanthropy in Fair Trade and Socially Responsible Investment Organizations

Indiana University, Bloomington IN

Investigators

Abstract

SES-0926887 Timothy Bartley Curtis Child Indiana University In recent decades, organizations that actively pursue both profit-generating and socially beneficial goals have grown in popularity. Often referred to as social enterprises, they are micro-lending institutions, fair trade organizations, socially responsible investment firms, nonprofit ventures, and social purpose businesses. They work to simultaneously create social and economic value in a direct, explicit way. The investigators will use the case of social enterprise to examine what happens when historically incongruous logics, such as capitalism and philanthropy, interact within organizations. The research investigates, empirically, the challenges inherent to the practice of social enterprise and, theoretically, how social enterprise might inform the scholarship on institutional logics. To focus the analysis, the study asks two sets of questions: (1) How do individuals and organizations address the challenge of reconciling competing logics? (2) Why are some organizations able to tightly couple incongruous institutional logics while others struggle to do so? To investigate these questions, the co-investigator will complete 60 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with members of 40 organizations: socially responsible mutual funds and fair trade organizations (as well as a subset of their more conventional counterparts) in the Bay Area, New York City, and Boston. Social enterprise offers a theoretically rich site to investigate institutional logics because it provides a difficult test case for their reconciliation. While scholars agree that logics are multiple and overlapping, research in economic, cultural, and organizational sociology provides fundamentally inconsistent visions of their companionability. The study of social enterprise will therefore provide an opportunity to speak to these important theoretical matters in an empirically grounded way. Besides its theoretical appeal to sociologists, this research promises to be of great interest to policy makers, practitioners, and consumers who want to better understand fair trade and social investing, as well as social enterprise generally