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

蒂莫西·巴特利·柯蒂斯儿童印第安纳大学近几十年来，积极追求盈利和社会利益目标的组织越来越受欢迎。通常被称为社会企业，它们是小额贷款机构、公平交易组织、对社会负责的投资公司、非营利性企业和社会目的企业。它们以直接、明确的方式同时创造社会和经济价值。调查人员将利用社会企业的案例来研究当资本主义和慈善等历史上不协调的逻辑在组织内部相互作用时会发生什么。这项研究从经验上考察了社会企业实践所固有的挑战，并从理论上探讨了社会企业如何为学术界提供制度逻辑方面的信息。为了集中分析，这项研究提出了两组问题：(1)个人和组织如何解决协调相互竞争的逻辑的挑战？(2)为什么一些组织能够紧密结合不协调的制度逻辑，而另一些组织则难以做到这一点？为了调查这些问题，联合调查员将对40个组织的成员进行60次深入的半结构化采访：湾区、纽约市和波士顿的社会责任共同基金和公平贸易组织(以及更传统的组织的子集)。社会企业提供了一个理论上丰富的场所来研究制度逻辑，因为它为他们的和解提供了一个困难的测试案例。虽然学者们一致认为逻辑是多重和重叠的，但经济、文化和组织社会学的研究提供了关于它们的伴随性的根本不一致的观点。因此，对社会企业的研究将提供一个机会，以经验性的方式谈论这些重要的理论问题。除了对社会学家的理论吸引力外，这项研究有望对希望更好地了解公平贸易和社会投资的政策制定者、从业者和消费者以及一般的社会企业产生极大的兴趣。

SES-0926887Timothy BartleyCurtis ChildIndiana UniversityIn 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