Mix and match: Essays on collective dynamics in nascent social entrepreneurship

Social entrepreneurship is increasingly recognized both in research and practice as a form of entrepreneurship that is inherently hybrid as it combines a social-welfare logic with a commercial logic at its core. Collective dynamics, whether they point at an networked individual or a team, appear particularly salient both in the discourse on social entrepreneurship and in its practice. These would constitute a distinguishing feature of social entrepreneurship, which this dissertation examines through a set of four related research papers. First, social entrepreneurship as generically collective is taken as a starting point to review the literature. In particular, it identifies how the social network concept is used in relation to social entrepreneurship and develops research proposals aiming to explain social entrepreneurship emergence through this lens. Considering the entrepreneurial team as a crystallized social network that allows for bridging distinct logics constitutes one of these proposals, which is further explored in the second paper. Grounded in institutional theory, it develops a processual model describing how hybridity emerges and sustains throughout the entrepreneurial process and suggests that the entrepreneurial team may be a carrier of hybridity. The empirical part of the dissertation examines particular moments of this process. The third paper questions the collective dimension by seeking individuals’ meanings of entrepreneuring in team in the context of social entrepreneurship. Located a bit further in time in the entrepreneurial process, the fourth paper looks at organizational tensions in social entrepreneurial teams and nascent social enterprises and seeks to portray the manifestations of hybridity. Overall, this dissertation contributes to institutional theory by exploring the emergence of hybrid organizations; to team entrepreneurship literature by unravelling its antecedents and by explaining tensions in a context of institutional complexity; and to knowledge on social entrepreneurship by examining its collective dynamics at the early stages of the process.