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

近几十年来，积极追求盈利和社会效益目标的组织越来越受欢迎。它们通常被称为社会企业，包括小额贷款机构、公平贸易组织、社会责任投资公司、非营利企业和社会目的企业。他们以直接、明确的方式同时创造社会和经济价值。研究人员将以社会企业为例，研究历史上不协调的逻辑，如资本主义和慈善事业，在组织内部相互作用时会发生什么。该研究从经验上调查了社会企业实践中固有的挑战，从理论上调查了社会企业如何为制度逻辑方面的学术研究提供信息。为了集中分析，该研究提出了两组问题：(1)个人和组织如何应对调和竞争逻辑的挑战？(2)为什么有些组织能够将不协调的制度逻辑紧密结合在一起，而有些组织却很难做到这一点？为了调查这些问题，联合研究者将对湾区、纽约市和波士顿的40个组织的成员进行60次深入的半结构化访谈：社会责任共同基金和公平贸易组织（以及他们更传统的同行的一部分）。社会企业为研究制度逻辑提供了一个理论上丰富的场所，因为它为两者的调和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重叠的，但经济、文化和组织社会学的研究却从根本上提供了不一致的观点。因此，对社会企业的研究将提供一个机会，以一种基于经验的方式来讨论这些重要的理论问题。除了对社会学家的理论吸引力外，这项研究承诺对希望更好地了解公平贸易和社会投资以及社会企业的政策制定者，从业者和消费者产生极大的兴趣

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