Corporate Responses to Social Issues: Essays in Social Entrepreneurship and Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporations face pressure from governments, civil society groups and consumers to respond to social problems in their operating environments or to improve the sustainability characteristics of their products, services and supply chains. Companies respond to these problems in order to gain legitimacy with these stakeholders while entrepreneurs develop new products/services to take advantage of opportunities to address these social problems through market mechanisms.

In this dissertation, I examine two forms of corporate responses to social issues: social entrepreneurship and corporate social action (CSA). Specifically, I aim to theorise the emergence of social entrepreneurship and explicate the implementation and management of CSA in a multinational enterprise (MNE). In addition, I aim to contribute to the practice of organisational ethnography by proposing techniques that researchers may employ to compensate for the limits of traditional interviewing and participant observation in the study of rapidly changing organisations.

The three studies in this dissertation advance scholarship in entrepreneurship, corporate social responsibility (CSR) and organisational ethnography. In the first study, I conduct a 15-month study of Amsterdam-based social venture, Fairphone. I argue that effectual entrepreneurial agency is co-constituted by distributed agency, the proactive conferral of material resources and legitimacy to an eventual entrepreneur by actors external to the new venture. I show how, in the context of social movement activism, an effectual network pre-committed resources to an inchoate social enterprise to produce a material artifact because it embodied the moral values of network members. I develop a model of enterprise emergence based on these findings and theorise the role of material artifacts in effectuation. I suggest that a material artifact served as a boundary object, present in multiple social words and triggering commitment from actors not governed by hierarchical arrangements.
In the second study, I investigate the implementation of corporate social actions (CSA) and public justifications of those actions by a Chinese MNE operating in Kenya. I show how a corporate social responsibility (CSR) programme that is developed in one country to acquiesce to local institutional demands is discursively justified by another subunit of the MNE to constituents geographically removed from the site of those practices. I suggest that the paradox approach to legitimacy management by social action—an approach that has been theorised but not empirically examined—may not lead to inherent conflict as assumed in the literature if the MNE’s cost of acquiescence in one domain is low and institutional pressure in another weak.
In the third study, I investigate the limits of traditional data collection techniques in the ethnography of modern organisations and examine how organisational ethnographers may employ self-documenting practices in these organisations to produce compelling accounts of organisational life. I argue that modern organisations produce voluminous amounts of documentary records and digital data that organisational researchers can exploit to increase the validity of ethnographic studies and produce compelling portraits of modern organisational life. I illustrate my argument by drawing on my 15-month long study of Fairphone. I suggest that by combining analyses of multiple forms of interactions, researchers of modern organisations can expand the notion of the ethnographic field, which has historically being conceived as a bounded, physical space in which social interactions occur, to include the virtual spaces comprising digitally-mediated interactions that characterise modern organisational life.