Creating an Institutional Field for Social Enterprise

TL;DRAbstract

Despite increased expectations that businesses will attend to the social good, many of the systems and mechanisms that support the creation and growth of small businesses remain oriented toward the profit motive. Thus social enterprises are operating in a nascent institutional field, one where old institutional arrangements are still powerful and new collective arrangements are not yet fully formed or shared. Construction of an institutional field requires the development of a “community of organizations that partakes of a common meaning system and whose participants interact more frequently and fatefully with one another than with actors outside the field” (Scott, 1995: 56). However, little research addresses the mechanisms by which fields form and the nature of the interactions among (potential) field members (Wooten & Hoffman, 2008). In this paper, we present a theoretical framework for investigating the mechanisms and processes underlying field formation. Noting that field dynamics

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