Janusian Change Agents

Janusian Change Agents

Legitimation Processes in the Case of Social New

Ventures

Master Thesis submitted by Claire Bentata Student Number S2260972/B1048086

Dual Degree in Advanced International Business and Management University of Groningen and Newcastle University

Supervisors: Dr. Bartjan Pennink (Groningen) and Dr. Joanna Berry (Newcastle) Date of Submission: 02.12.2012

C

ONTENTS

List of Tables ... iii

List of Figures ... iv Abstract ... v Introduction ... 1 Literature Review... 3 Social Entrepreneurship ... 3 Organisational Legitimacy ... 6

Organisational Legitimacy and Commercial Entrepreneurship ... 7

Organisational Legitimacy and Social New Ventures ... 11

Method ... 14

Sample and Data Collection ... 16

Coding and Analysis ... 17

First Round Data Collection and Analysis ... 20

Second Round Data Collection and Analysis ... 21

Findings... 22

Explicit Legitimation Process ... 23

Subliminal Legitimation Process ... 25

Diagnostic Framing – The Status Quo: Bureaucracy, Institutionalism, Business ... 27

Prognostic and Motivational Framing – The Social Venture and its Change Mission: Entrepreneurship, Social Mission, Non-profit ... 30

Discussion ... 34

Limitations ... 39

Future Directions ... 41

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IST OF

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ABLES

Table 1. Mechanisms legitimacy attainment commercial ventures ... 9

Table 2. Mechanisms legitimacy attainment social ventures ... 13

Table 3. Overview participants ... 18

Table 4. Strategies employed to enhance soundness of the method ... 19

Table 5. Explicit legitimation mechanisms ... 24

Table 6. Subliminal legitimation mechanisms – Diagnostic framing ... 28

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IST OF

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BSTRACT

I

NTRODUCTION

The practice of social entrepreneurship has been growing in amount and prominence (Weerawardena and Mort, 2006; Stokes, 2011) and public awareness of the phenomenon has increased dramatically in the past two decades (Dorado, 2006). Whereas governments, foundations, fellowship organisations as well as the media are found to be the main paradigm-shaping institutions (Mair, 2010; Nicholls, 2010), the role of academia in advancing social entrepreneurship research as an individual scholarly field of inquiry and in providing answers to the idiosyncrasies of social entrepreneurship seems to be lagging behind (see for instance Short et al., 2009). In light of the infancy of the social entrepreneurship domain, scholars have urgently called for promoting the theoretical foundations of the field by moving from mainly anecdotal and exploratory accounts to more empirically sound insights (Nicholls, 2010; Dacin et al., 2011). Pioneering business and management science contributions in the young field mainly strove to create a consensus as to the broader boundaries of the field (see for instance Austin et al., 2006; Chell, 2007), and were targeted at delimiting socially entrepreneurial endeavours that are characterised by a double bottom line of both social and financial sustainability from commercial and purely profit-oriented processes (Dorado, 2006; Shaw and Carter, 2007 inter alia). With the boundaries having been explored for the past decade, attention in the nascent field is now turning to more precise phenomena such as individual characteristics of the social entrepreneur or the process of building and scaling up social enterprises (Townsend and Hart, 2008; Sud et al., 2009). Among the many promising paths of future contributions in the social entrepreneurship domain, paying attention to the delicacies of the start-up process of social new ventures is suggested to be of particular relevance (Dorado, 2006; Short et al., 2009). Considering the fact that 40 per cent of small businesses fail within the first 5 years of operation (Headd and Kirchhoff, 2009), and that social new ventures are considerably more liable to an early organisational death than their commercial counterparts (Renko, 2012), illustrating the dynamics of the early phase of social enterprise start-up promises to deliver insightful results. Accordingly, understanding how and why some social entrepreneurs succeed whereas others are unable to cross the line of organisational survival is of crucial importance for the social entrepreneurship research community.

enterprises which succeed in portraying their organisation as “desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions.” (Suchmann, 1995: 574) are considerably more likely to survive the early phases of venture start-up since resource constraints and the liability of newness apply less to these ventures (Singh et al., 1986; Baum and Oliver, 1991). Although the concept of legitimacy has been evoked frequently in papers reviewing the current state of research in the field of social entrepreneurship (Dart, 2004; Dorado, 2006; Dacin et al., 2011), the process of legitimacy establishment in the case of new social ventures remains opaque, and scholars have been surprisingly mute in relation to determining the mechanisms that new social enterprises employ in order to be perceived as legitimate. Not only do we “[not] know much about the strategies employed in social entrepreneurship to manage legitimacy needs or the extent to which these strategies differ from conventional entrepreneurship” (Dacin et al., 2011: 1207), but additionally disputing assumptions exist as to whether social new ventures are particularly liable to tensions in legitimation dynamics.

The present paper addresses these concerns by setting off to shed light on the characteristics of legitimacy establishment in the case of social new ventures. Departing from the assumption that characteristics which are specific to social enterprises might significantly impact on the process of acquiring legitimacy in the case of this particular kind of nascent organisations, my grounded theory approach shows that social new ventures engage in two forms of legitimation processes. On the one hand, my findings illuminate explicit mechanisms that the social entrepreneurs openly refer to and that to a great extent match mechanisms employed by commercial counterparts. These explicit mechanisms however form but a small part of the general process of legitimacy establishment. The major effort of portraying the social venture and its mission in desirable and appropriate terms is on the other hand characterised by subtle discursive practices which frame the venture’s characteristics as well as desired outcomes in a constructive, and opposing entities in a transformational or even destructive manner. Consequently, I find the process of social legitimacy establishment to be context-dependent and of a socially constructed nature, since social enterprises draw on both the social and the business logics they are embedded in.

organisational legitimacy. The third section introduces the method and the research process. The remainder of the paper illustrates the key findings from the analysis and discusses contributions to the social entrepreneurship field and beyond.

L

ITERATURE

R

EVIEW

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Hervieux et al., 2010; Nicholls, 2010), and management and commercial entrepreneurship scholars are found to increasingly engage in excursions en route to the young field (see for instance Zahra et al., 2009).

corporate philanthropy.” Taking into account both the entrepreneurial as well as the social character of social ventures’ value maximising operations and their change mission, Mair and Martí (2006: 37) arrive at the following definition of social entrepreneurship, which will be adapted as a working definition for the purpose of this paper:

“First, we view social entrepreneurship as a process of creating value by combining resources in new ways. Second, these resource combinations are intended primarily to explore and exploit opportunities to create social value by stimulating social change or meeting social needs. And third, when viewed as a process, social entrepreneurship involves the offering of services and products but can also refer to the creation of new organizations.”

Given that the upsurge in academic publications on social entrepreneurship is occurring only recently, it is a field with many promising areas of further inquiry (Short et al., 2009; Dacin et al., 2010; Mair, 2010; Dacin et al., 2011). Former research can mainly be clustered according to the central focus of analysis. Studies herein range from the individual social entrepreneur and his characteristics (Zahra et al., 2009) to the process of social entrepreneurship in general and mostly opportunity recognition in particular (Cohen and Winn, 2007; Doyle-Corner and Ho, 2010) as well as to the effects and outcomes of social entrepreneurship (Dorado, 2006). In order to advance the study of social entrepreneurship, which in the beginning stages was heavily characterised by anecdotal evidence and exploratory studies, several scholars call for the integration of established and scientifically sound theories into the field (Short et al., 2009; Dacin et al., 2011). Furthermore, it is believed that research interest should move away from a main focus on individual entrepreneurial characteristics to studies directed towards processes at the different stages of the organisational life-cycle (ib.).1 Accordingly, there is a pressing urge from experts to foster an understanding of the particular dynamics and challenges involved in starting a social venture (Austin et al., 2006; Zahra et al., 2009). Similarly, an increasing number of scholars aim at instigating researchers to situate the phenomenon in its specific context to fully understand it (Hjorth, 2009; Vasi, 2009). Specifically, this can be achieved by filling theoretical voids through the adaptation and integration of concepts which have been proven useful in

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related fields of academic inquiry (see for instance Short et al., 2009).2 A concept which features prominently on the aforementioned dimensions in the area of commercial entrepreneurship but has surprisingly only received scant attention in the field of social entrepreneurship is the concept of organisational legitimacy, which I endeavour to illuminate further in the next section. Organisational legitimacy as a contextually dependent and socially constructed phenomenon seems to be a suitable concept to apply when answering the call for shedding light on the process of social venture initiation and potential constraints faced.

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The most cited definition of organisational legitimacy was established by Suchmann (1995) in his seminal work on the management of legitimacy. Acknowledging the socially embedded character of the concept, Suchmann (1995: 574) defines legitimacy as “a generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions.” Organisational and institutional theory scholars have recognised and confronted the need for differentiating between particular types of legitimacy (Bitekine, 2011). Taking a closer look at legitimacy and its relevance for organisations, Suchmann (1995) distinguishes between three applicable forms3: (1) pragmatic legitimacy derives out of stakeholder interest, i.e. rests on stakeholders’ self-interest, (2) moral legitimacy is based on stakeholder evaluation and contains a normative assessment of the organisation’s actions, a form of evaluative approval and (3) cognitive legitimacy is founded on stakeholders’ cognition and concerns the cognitive taken-for-grantedness of an organisation. Moreover, “as one moves from the pragmatic to the moral or the cognitive, legitimacy becomes more elusive to obtain and more difficult to manipulate, but it also becomes more subtle, more profound, and more self-sustaining, once established.” (Suchmann, 1995: 585). Generally, one can identify two main approaches applied in studies concerned with organisational legitimacy: one can be labelled institutional, the other strategic (Suchmann, 1995; Tornikoski and Newbert, 2007). This binary distinction is also espoused in the majority of recent papers on legitimacy,

2

Similarly, Dorado (2006) cautions against a mere translation of findings from research on the creation of new ventures to the creation of social new ventures, but maintains that the peculiarities of social new ventures need to be taken into account.

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leading to theoretical approaches differing “in the extent to which forces pushing for institutionalisation and legitimacy derive from features of the institutional environment or from intentionality and action on the part of organisational actors.” (Brinkerhoff, 2005: 2). Work within the first stream then acknowledges sector- and society-wide dynamics that generate pressures to which an organisation has to adapt, making the quest for legitimacy a process of isomorphic pressures in the long-run (Dowling and Pfeffer, 1975; Van de Ven and Garud, 1993; Lawrence et al., 2002). Strategic approaches on the other hand depart from the assumption that organisations act and use instruments to deploy symbols which enable them to garner social support. In this fashion they emphasise the ability of organisations to take proactive steps towards attaining legitimacy (Humphreys and Brown, 2002; Zimmermann and Zeitz, 2002; Suddaby and Greenwood, 2005). Even though such a clear-cut binary distinction is often made in the theoretical arguments of contributions on organisational legitimacy, as soon as empirical findings are integrated and discussed it becomes obvious that such a black or white approach is hard to sustain. Indeed, “[b]ecause real-world organizations face both strategic operational challenges and institutional constitutive pressures, it is important to incorporate this duality into a larger picture” (Suchmann, 1995: 577). Accordingly, it is neither exclusively the organisational surroundings pushing for conformity nor solely the organisation manipulating its environment, but often a dynamic interplay of macro- and meso-level institutional forces and micro-level organisational strategies that are decisive in the quest for organisational legitimacy. This becomes evident when examining contributions related to legitimacy dynamics in the field of commercial entrepreneurship, as the next section shows.

ORGANISATIONAL LEGITIMACY AND COMMERCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP

understand the nature of the new ventures, and their conformity to established institutional rules may still be in question.” (Aldrich and Fiol, 1994: 645). Several studies have thus departed to show, and succeeded in showing that the attainment of organisational legitimacy significantly reduces the liabilities of newness and small size and is able to attenuate the new ventures’ hazard of death (Singh et al., 1986; Baum and Oliver, 1991).

Founded on the pertinence for new ventures to gain or build legitimacy, research on mechanisms which allow firms to become legitimate in the eyes of their social environment is abundant (see for instance Aldrich, 1990; Zott and Huy, 2007; Clarke, 2011). Suchmann (1995) characterises legitimacy-building as a proactive and entrepreneurial act, the mechanisms of which can be clustered along three categories: (1) conformity with the dictates of the environment, (2) selection among multiple environments to find the most appropriate one for the single organisation, and (3) manipulation of the societal structure by legitimating new beliefs and values. Zimmermann and Zeitz (2002) add a fourth mechanism, the creation of a new social context, which takes the idea of manipulation of the social structure even one step further. It is moreover commonly accepted that the management of legitimacy rests crucially on communication, including not only verbal discourse but being extended towards non-verbal displays (Suchmann, 1995; Clarke, 2011). Among more specific activities which have been found to grant legitimacy to a newly established organisation thus are rhetorical devices (Cornelissen et al., 2012), symbolic action (Zott and Huy, 2007) and the association with established players, either through network ties (Aldrich, 1990; Tornikoski and Newbert, 2007) or alliance formation (Rao et al., 2008). Table 1 gives an overview of influential papers that have been published on the establishment of legitimacy in the case of commercial ventures.

Table 1 Mechanisms legitimacy attainment commercial ventures

Author(s) Focus of paper Subject of analysis Nature of study

Method (if

applicable) Main argument Rao (1994) Meso and

micro

Industry and new ventures

Empirical Regression analysis Industry-specific contests help to establish reputation for both the industry as a whole and for their winners as individual players within it.

Vaara et al. (2006) Meso Industry/sector merger

Empirical Media analysis Usage of five main discursive legitimation strategies in the media: (1) normalisation through retrospective, (2) reference to authorities (market, stockbrokers, investor), (3) economic rationalisation, (4) moralisation through humanistic vs. neoliberal discourse, (5) narrativisation (i.e. telling a story in form of a drama). Navis and Glynn

(2010) Meso and micro Market category/industry and newcomers within it Empirical Mixed-method design

Mechanisms (linguistic frames, identities, affiliations) shift according to legitimacy of industry. Introduction of concept of 'optimal distinctiveness', i.e. conforming in the starting stages and enforcing uniqueness once industry is accredited with legitimacy. Starr and Macmillan

(1990)

Micro New ventures and corporate

intrapreneurs

Conceptual n.a. Co-optation of legitimacy and resources is achieved through the exploitation of social assets (i.e. connections with internal and external actors) the venture's team possesses.

Lounsbury and Glynn (2001)

Micro New ventures Conceptual n.a. Elements of entrepreneurial storytelling are directed at the venture's environment and emphasise the profitability of the enterprise in terms of resource and institutional capital. Congruence with similar organisational forms also serves as source of legitimacy.

Shepherd and Zacharakis (2003)

Micro Customer

assessment of new ventures

Empirical Conjoint analysis Three influential types of knowledge determine a venture's cognitive legitimacy from the consumer's point of view, these are in sequence of importance knowledge about (1) the product, (2) the organisation, (3) the management team.

Delmar and Shane (2004)

Micro New ventures Empirical Mixed-method design

Completing a business plan and establishing a legal entity facilitate other organisational activities of the new venture and help establish legitimacy and thus reduce venture failure.

Martens et al. (2007)

Micro Young enterprises Empirical Mixed-method design

Table 1 (continued)

Author(s) Focus of paper Subject of analysis Nature of study

Method (if

applicable) Main argument Tornikoski and

Newbert (2007)

Micro New ventures Empirical Time series regression

Strategic legitimacy (actively engaging in convincing external audiences of operationality of the venture) is found to be more important in explaining organisational emergence than conforming legitimacy (being perceived as credible by its environment on the basis of its characteristics).

Zott and Huy (2007) Micro New ventures Empirical Multiple case-study Four types of symbolic action are found to influence a venture's legitimacy: (1) personal credibility through business school degree and personal commitment, (2) professional organisation

(professional structures such as corporate hierarchy and dress code), (3) organisational achievement (awards, venture age, number of employees), (4) prestigious stakeholders and personal attention given to them.

Rao et al. (2008) Micro New ventures Empirical Regression analysis Distinction between external legitimacy (derived from forming alliance with outsiders) and internal legitimacy (derived from successful product launches, technical and academic expertise, and marketing and management expertise). Duplication of internal legitimacy with legitimacy gained through external means is not successful, i.e. there is a trade-off between external and internal legitimacy mechanisms.

Clarke (2011) Micro New ventures Empirical Ethnographic field study

Visual symbols (setting, props, dress and expressiveness) need to be employed alongside verbal articulations in order to achieve

successful interaction with stakeholders. Depending on the

experience of the entrepreneur, they possess different skill levels of engaging in symbolic action.

Cornelissen et al. (2012)

Micro New ventures Empirical Ethnographic field study

Usage of metaphors in both speech and gestures helps to abstract complex processes and transfer them to everyday settings. Images of movement are evoked in order to naturalise the process of venture set-up.

Nagy et al. (2012) Micro External assessment of new ventures

ORGANISATIONAL LEGITIMACY AND SOCIAL NEW VENTURES

Although social entrepreneurship has been accredited with growing attention from management and entrepreneurship scholars alike, the process of legitimacy establishment in the case of new social ventures remains opaque, and academia has been surprisingly mute in relation to determining the characteristics that social enterprises deploy in order to be perceived as “desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions.” (Suchmann, 1995: 574).4

Newly established social enterprises are exposed to the many challenges faced by organisations in their infancy, among which one can identify opportunity recognition, resource scarcity and the liability of newness (Tracey and Jarvis, 2007; London and Morfopoulos, 2010; Dacin et al., 2011). However, there are several factors which add complexity to the establishment and initiation of a social enterprise beyond typical start-up obstacles. Featuring most importantly on this realm is the duality of the organisation’s goal which can be seen as the main reason for why the tensions in legitimation dynamics to which Suchmann (1995) referred are potentially a pressing challenge especially for actors involved in social entrepreneurship (Dart, 2004; Thompson and Doherty, 2006; Chell, 2007). It is acknowledged that in order to be successful a social entrepreneur must act as a bridging force between the business and the social sector since both “use very different thought processes and equally different languages. The successful social entrepreneur must act as translator, ambassador, and facilitator between these two worlds.” (Kickul and Lyons, 2012: 21). Accordingly, Short et al. (2009) propose that a social venture’s environment has a direct influence on the organisation’s ability to conform to its dual bottom line mission while simultaneously needing to convince multiple stakeholders of the viability of operating within competing logics: generating profits on the one hand and conjointly addressing social problems (Townsend and Hart, 2008; Moizer and Tracey, 2010; Mair et al., 2012). Indeed what might be a consequence of the difficulty in managing multiple stakeholders when pursuing a dual or triple bottom line is the trend of several social ventures that used to be a single organisational form to split up their operations in two: one revenue generating stream and another detached entity which functions like a charity and exists to solely achieve the venture’s social aim (Moizer and Tracey, 2010; Strom, 2010). Other challenges specific to social new ventures include the necessity of

4 _{To build a common basis of understanding, I define social new ventures as young, for-profit ventures that provide}

demonstrating social impact in the absence of formalised tools for social performance and impact measurement (Austin et al., 2006; Wei-Skillern et al., 2007), the management of accountability in the face of multiple stakeholders (London and Morfopoulos, 2010) as well as a high personal involvement of the entrepreneur which might lead to cognitive biases that hamper performance (Renko, 2012). In the light of these obstacles it comes as no surprise that nascent entrepreneurs who aim at building a venture with primarily socially oriented goals are significantly less likely to succeed in building a viable organisation in the first years after inception than their financially motivated peers (ib.).

Table 2 Mechanisms legitimacy attainment social ventures

Author(s) Focus of paper Subject of analysis Nature of study Method (if

applicable) Main argument Dart (2004) Meso Social entrepreneurship

as field of study

Conceptual n.a. In order to obtain moral legitimacy, social ventures might need to give in to isomorphic pressures of the predominant business logic present in society currently.

Hervieux, Gedajlovic and Turcotte (2010)

Meso Social entrepreneurship as field of study

Empirical Discourse analysis Convergence in discourses of main players of the field (consultants, foundations and academics) who describe social entrepreneurship by integrating social and business logic, thus legitimising the use of previously contradictory logics.

Nicholls (2010) Meso Social entrepreneurship as discipline

Empirical Discourse analysis Social entrepreneurship exists in a pre-paradigmatic state where powerful actors make use of their resource-superiority in order to shape legitimating discourses and align them with their internal logics and actions. Ruebottom (2011) Micro Social enterprises Empirical Multiple case-study Social enterprises make use of culturally accepted

meta-narratives that portray the organisation as hero and opponents to its mission as villains.

Schmitz and Then (2011)

Micro New social ventures Speculative Anecdotal evidence In order to achieve legitimacy, social ventures need to balance different stakeholder interest by using emotional narration that appellate to the moral reasoning of the stakeholders.

able to draw on their (presumably) closer proximity to a certain aim (social value creation for non-profit enterprises and financial viability for commercial new ventures) when it comes to legitimation tensions (see for instance London and Morfopoulos, 2010; Moizer and Tracey, 2010).

I conclude from my literature review that the acquirement of organisational legitimacy is a process which has been evoked frequently in papers reviewing the current state of research in the field of social entrepreneurship. Yet, apart from one noteworthy exception (Ruebottom, 2011) it still remains neglected in the undertaking of providing social entrepreneurship research with a sound theoretical foundation. In the light of the acknowledged importance of organisational legitimacy for nascent ventures and taking into account the multiplicity of mechanisms applicable to gain legitimacy, it appears fruitful for the purpose of theory building to extend the analysis of characteristics of legitimacy attainment to a broader level. Consequently, I argue for the necessity to gain an in-depth understanding of the characteristics of organisational legitimacy establishment in the case of social new ventures. Thus, the general research question which I depart to answer within the present paper is:

What are characteristics of organisational legitimacy establishment in the case of social new ventures?

M

ETHOD

As discussed throughout the previous section, research on social entrepreneurship is a field still in its infancy (Dacin et al., 2010; Mair, 2010). Even though some authors caution against the overreliance on a single method in the young field since this might decrease its chances to move beyond developmental stages (Short et al., 2009; Dacin et al., 2011), in-depth, qualitative studies have contributed significantly to the area of social entrepreneurship as they “allow [for a] greater understanding of the complex social processes involved.” (Ruebottom, 2011: without page numbers). Moreover, as hinted at in the previous section legitimacy is a multifaceted and broad construct (some may even say imprecise, see Mitchell et al., 1997), which is difficult to measure quantitatively.5 _{This might be the reason for why a sizeable number of papers related to the}

perceived appropriateness and desirability of new enterprises is of conceptual or qualitative

5 _{A number of researchers have commented on the construct’s fuzziness (Shepherd and Zacharakis, 2003;}

nature (see Tables 1 and 2 in the former section). Nevertheless, some entrepreneurship scholars have tried to circumvent the construct’s fuzziness by proxying the degree of legitimacy of a new venture quantitatively (see for instance Rao et al., 2008). Admittedly, this is more difficult in the case of social new ventures since their social output is barely measurable, tools to assess a social return on investment are just starting to be developed and well-founded databases of social (new) ventures do not yet exist (Tracey and Jarvis, 2007; Townsend and Hart, 2008).6 _{Furthermore, the}

study’s open research question clearly calls for a qualitative, in-depth study (Cooper and Schindler, 2003; Thomas, 2004).

Grounded theory methodology, which aims to discover theory from data (Glaser and Strauss, 1967), can be employed if the goal is to develop an in-depth understanding of a process as well as to shed light on an issue which requires a fresh approach (Stern, 1994, cited after Weerawardena and Mort, 2006). Since legitimacy building in the case of social new ventures as focal phenomenon is not well understood and there is strong evidence to assume that conventional conceptions of legitimacy mechanisms do not sufficiently explain the situation at hand, a study of inductive, qualitative nature is essential for answering this dissertation’s open research question (Thomas, 2004). I am aware of the fact that the use of an inductive approach limits generalisation; however, such generalisation is not the purpose of this research. Rather my aim is to engender a tentative model of the process and decipher the characteristics of legitimacy formation in the case of social new ventures by applying a fresh lens and making a mid-range theoretical contribution from which to further develop the social entrepreneurship discipline.7 Thus, the methodological procedure is strongly informed by influential contributions which have been made in the area of grounded theory research (Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Stern, 1994; Charmaz, 2006; Birks and Mills, 2011). However, I acknowledge that the present study can by no means claim to have acquired the theoretical preciseness and refinement of a model grounded theory study. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, since it was not my aim to create a new, all-inclusive theory of legitimacy in the area of social new ventures, but rather to illuminate its

6 _{Notwithstanding, once progress has been made in this area I believe that testing the quest for legitimacy of social}

new ventures by means other than qualitative inquiry offers a fruitful area of further research. This would also satisfy the call for a more varied approach towards methodological usage in social entrepreneurship research (Short et al., 2009; Moss et al., 2010).

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characteristics from an illustrative point of view, theory building requirements were adapted to this need. Secondly, and not less influential on the point of theoretical refinement comes the argument of a restrained time-frame to conduct the study, which called for the closure of analysis at a certain point, even though complete theoretical saturation might not have been reached yet. Notwithstanding, I trust that the extensive analysis of generated data, and several mechanisms used to enhance robustness of and confidence in the analysis’ results, will refute eventual concerns about the technical validity of the mechanisms employed.

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D

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Having reviewed the literature it became apparent that much has been speculated on the process of legitimacy establishment in the case of social enterprises, but little empirical research has been conducted in order to move beyond merely anecdotal arguments. Thus, after identifying this gap in current scholarly work I followed the advice of Eisenhardt (1989) by putting the literature aside and began my research without formalising any expectations concerning the dynamics of legitimacy attainment in the case of social new ventures.8 Instead, I collected data in two major, somewhat overlapping steps by engaging with social entrepreneurs that at the time of collecting the data were involved in the set-up of a social venture or had been starting a social enterprise within the last four years.9 I find it important to state that I did not plan such a binary procedure beforehand, but that it was a result of the organic evolution of the research process. However, I am convinced that this binary progression helped me to attenuate initial struggles encountered due to the freedom provided by the research method, and I thus consider it to enhance this dissertation’s quality by extenuating my personal ‘liability of newness’. First-round data helped to sensitise me in relation to relevant issues within the process of new social venture legitimisation and served to guide the second step of data collection into a more focused direction, since codes and categories emerged as research and analysis progressed. This enabled me to better concentrate and structure efforts in the second round and organise data collection around themes that proved to be representative.

8

I would like to state that at that point I had however already written the literature review for my dissertation proposal, so I did not go into the field being completely impartial, as suggested by some researchers (see for instance Glaser, 1992). Notwithstanding there are a number of scholars who highlight the orienting character of an initial literature review in a favourable manner, especially if the researcher is inexperienced (see for instance Lempert, 2007; Urquhart, 2007).

9 _{Concerning the time period used when examining start-up processes of new ventures, it is common standard in}

Since a theoretical sampling approach was deemed most appropriate under the circumstances of the study, respondents were chosen for illustrative reasons rather than for analytical purpose (Eisenhardt, 1989). “The rationale of theoretical sampling […] is to direct all data gathering efforts towards gathering information that will best support development of the theoretical framework” (Locke, 2001: 55); thus data collection was aimed at leading to a more condensed focus concerning the important characteristics of legitimacy attainment in the case of social new ventures. Entrepreneurs who were willing to participate in the study were deemed suitable for the study’s purpose when they met two criteria: (1) they were the founder of the venture or a member of the organisation’s founding team, and (2) they identified themselves as being currently involved in the start-up process of a social venture or having started a social enterprise within the last four years.10 This theoretical sampling approach led to a total number of five participants with organisation that were all based in Holland and were operating in a variety of sectors (see Table 3 for an overview of participants). Four participants (Coaching and Consultancy A for round one and Consultancy B and Service for round two) provided me with data in only one of the rounds whereas Health Care was part of the collection process in both rounds.11 Prior to commencement of the interaction, all participants were briefed about the broad nature of the study (see study brief, Appendix A) and were assured of the completely confidential treatment of the information provided. In case of informal meetings and field-trips, I asked participants to agree to me taking notes; in interview situations they were asked to give their consent to being interviewed and audio-taped (Thomas, 2004; Breakwell, 2006).

C

A

All assembled data were transcribed in order to be better analysable afterwards (see Appendix B). In addition, I kept a field diary where I made notes of interesting observations and first impressions after every interaction with a participant. I used these notes and further reflections in a next step for the process of memoing (see Appendix C). The memos herein served as ‘bank of ideas’ (Goulding, 2002: 65) that help the researcher to stay grounded in her data and raise the level of abstraction through interacting and reflecting upon the information collected (Miles and

10 _{Due to confidentiality agreements with the study’s participants, all names and personal information have been}

changed to fictional abbreviations.

11 _{This was the case since the initial, informal meeting with Health Care had to be interrupted due to time restraints}

Having transcribed the data, I used a three-step coding process, which is strongly informed by the procedure suggested by Charmaz (2006) and is iterative in nature. The process involves initial, focused and theoretical coding (see Appendix D for a diagram of the coding practise).12 Validity and integrity of research are substantial concerns in academia, maybe even more so if the selected research approach is of qualitative nature (Weerawardena and Mort, 2006). Hence, several strategies were implemented in order to enhance soundness of the present study (see Creswell, 2009), an overview of which can be found in Table 4.

In the following, I give a more accurate outline of the process of data collection, coding and analysis in each of the two stages.

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FIRST ROUND DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS

An initial informal meeting with one of the study’s participants (Consultancy A) showed that there was no awareness of the concept of legitimacy, but rather that it was perceived as a technical term which was hard to pronounce as well as difficult to understand. Thus, trying to tap into the mechanisms of legitimacy attainment by actively referring to the construct led to resistance on the entrepreneur’s side. Consequently, I refrained from using the term ‘legitimacy’ in the further research process and instead referred to “characteristics important for the formalisation of social new ventures” when communicating with participants (see study brief, Appendix A). Concerning sampling in the first round of data collection, I made use of my initial contact person (Consultancy A), since he was involved in a network organisation for social ventures and was thus able to identify entrepreneurs that would be suitable for the purpose of the present study. Hence, all other participants of both round one and round two were identified via a snowballing technique. Data in the first round were obtained within three weeks and were generated through a field trip that included observations and informal chats with one participant (Consultancy A) and informal conversations and brainstorming with the others, one in person (Health Care) and one via Skype (Coaching). Data was recorded through my field notes and comments, some of them being of observational nature, others being in vivo statements (Birks and Mills, 2011).13 Initial coding was characterised by its openness, which “should spark your thinking and allow new ideas to emerge.” (Charmaz, 2006: 48). I initially sorted the data by following Charmaz’ (2006) advice to distinguish between different types of incidents that can be derived from the data. Thus, I firstly assembled codes within cases according to three categories: (1) action codes related to the social venture/project (i.e. incidents where the respondent referred to his social venture or the project he was involved in in terms of actions, characteristics and feelings), (2) context codes related to the organisational environment (i.e. incidents where the respondent referred to external circumstances that influence him personally and/or his organisation/project), and (3) assessment codes related to the participant’s opinion and viewpoint. By sifting through the data in the early focused coding stage, it became apparent that most of the codes that had been categorised under broader themes were coinciding within the

13

three types of incidents, which prompted me to dissolve this separation again. Instead, I performed grounded thematic analysis of the data and grouped the initial codes under their corresponding roof-themes, irrespective of the incident’s quality (Braun and Clarke, 2006; Weerawardena and Mort, 2006). At this point I furthermore realised that the nature of my data was too vague in order to accurately ascertain mechanisms employed by social new ventures to gain legitimacy. Thus, parallel to the third step of coding in which I compared the focused codes of each case with each other and with the literature so as to generate abstract categories, I developed an interview guide (see Appendix E) and went into the field again. The categories that had evolved from the first round of data collection and analysis helped me to focus on representative themes herein. An overview of the results generated after each step of analysis within the first round is provided in Appendix F.

SECOND ROUND DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS

strategies focused at external stakeholders, participants did not explicitly make reference to ways of making their goals and actions being perceived as desirable. It was during this process that the usage of my memos, an iterative engagement with the literature and staying grounded in my data helped me to re-direct my focus and recognise subtle, discursive means employed by the interviewees as being constitutive for building an image of appropriateness and desirability. This fact prompted me to engage in a process of cyclical reading and re-reading of the data which was inspired by a variety of interpretive tools from the organisational discourse domain, namely entrepreneurial storytelling (Lounsbury and Glynn, 2001; Martens et al., 2007), discourse analysis (Suddaby and Greenwood, 2005; Vaara et al., 2006), rhetorical strategies (Van Leeuwen and Wodak, 1999; Ruebottom, 2011) and framing processes (Markowitz, 2007; Battilana et al., 2009). The variety of collected data and interpretive tools herein enabled me to triangulate my sources (see Zilber, 2002). My preliminary results were refined in a final step with further insights from the social entrepreneurship literature that served as template for comparison, hence allowing me to develop and contextualise my findings theoretically (Eisenhardt, 1989; Morse, 1994).

F

INDINGS

The qualitative analysis offers a rich illustration of the characteristics of legitimacy establishment in the case of the social new ventures in my sample. Emerging from the data is the insight that social new ventures’ establishment of legitimacy is a highly sensitive, contextually dependent and socially constructed process with two distinct facets in terms of palpability as well as prominence. It is on the one hand characterised by the usage of some explicit mechanisms that the entrepreneur openly refers to and that to a great extent match mechanisms employed by commercial counterparts. On the other hand it is defined to a considerably larger degree by subtle discursive practices that the entrepreneur engages in and that frame the venture’s characteristics as well as desired outcomes in a constructive, and opposing entities in a transformational or even destructive manner.

aim at constructing a legitimate image of the social venture. I provide direct quotes to introduce and illustrate my findings in every subsection (Breakwell, 2006).14

E

L

P

My data reveals only sparse direct evidence of characteristics of legitimacy establishment in the case of social new ventures. By direct evidence I mean incidents where the entrepreneurs explicitly refer to mechanisms that they pursue in order to make their goals, actions and products or services being perceived as desirable and appropriate by the involved stakeholders, which was the paraphrase of Suchmann’s (1995) definition of legitimacy that I adopted when briefing the participants prior to commencement of the study.

The incidents I found can be grouped into three classes of mechanisms, an overview of which is provided in Table 5. When making reference to reputed and experienced players in the respective sectors, social entrepreneurs (1) co-opt legitimacy by clearly leveraging their association and endorsement with these established entities (Starr and MacMillan, 1990). Along this line, Consultancy B for instance made reference to the cooperation with hospitality professionals when starting a socially oriented catering company, since he himself was not a professional in this area. Social entrepreneurs additionally (2) leverage credentials in the form of work experience or a successful track-record (Zott and Huy, 2007; Nagy et al., 2012), which serve to attenuate the uncertainty that is intrinsically tied to nascent ventures. This can be seen in Consultancy B speaking about his successful experience as a venture owner before starting the social enterprise or Service referring to the start-up as being extraordinarily successful in terms of growth and impact. A third explicit mechanisms is (3) translating, which makes the venture’s aims and actions understandable to stakeholders and portrays them as conforming to expected norms and cultural mind-sets (Aldrich and Fiol, 1994). Here Health Care for instance states that expressing the venture’s actions and goals in understandable terms for stakeholders leads to an increase in the chances of these stakeholders finally supporting the venture. In terms of the broader cluster of legitimacy strategies laid out by Suchmann (1995), it is remarkable that all of the mechanisms delineated above correspond to strategies aimed at conforming to the

14 _{Note that this section uses the findings obtained from the second round of data collection as they offer the}

Table 5 Explicit legitimation mechanisms Mechanism Participants making Illustrative Excerpts Co-optation Consultancy Service

I was very much involved in a restaurant, a catering group company. […] And the idea came from me, cause I thought we have to do something like this. And I found a group of people that implemented it. […] I was central in bringing people together but then I realised that I was not hospitality professional. And then the hospitality professionals they loved the idea and they said: We want to put our full effort, and and also some money in it, so they took over.

[D]o you know the theory of change of Margaret Wheatley? I guess this is how change happens in many ways, this is [...] her theory, she's a good friend of Service as well. Credentials Consultancy

Service

But we are both, because xxx and I, we are already in business for over 30 years so we had several companies ourselves and agencies. xxx had an agency with over 300 people, I had an agency, so around 120 people, so together we think we can make an impact. And, because we have also a track record of being successful in changes, and being successful in campaigns, that people believe us if we say something. [...] We are more or less, I have to be, how do you say that, bescheiden in Dutch [modest], we don't have to boast on ourselves, but we are more or less masters.

And, and I think then at some point when you're starting, [...] 4 years is actually not a lot and knowing that this is very successful, that we are extending and that the global is extending is just the perfect story to tell. So in, in many ways people [...] cannot not be convinced, you know. They have no choice but to believe it. They have no choice but because it's there and it's right in their face [...].

Translating Service

Health Care

Well, I guess in a very general sense you always translate ehm because ehm it really depends on whom you're communicating and what your ehm what the purpose is of the communication or the interaction. I do have for example lot of people coming from abroad from governments and ehm they come as a delegation and when they come they want to understand what it is. So the way I communicate to them is different than when I would communicate to a member and it will be different when I talk to the city council or to an investor. [...] [I]t's just every time I try to align on trying to reach their language and their culture and then I, I speak to them. [...] And then if you talk the same language so to say, cultural language or mind-set world-view ehm language then it's a lot easier because you meet each other there a lot more then [...].

organisation’s environment, i.e. positioning the venture within the existing institutional and cultural order of the nascent organisation’s environment (see Figure 1). How social entrepreneurs simultaneously try to manipulate their environment by the usage of subliminal discursive practices is the focus of the next section.

Figure 1. Explicit legitimation process

S

L

P

Insights concerning the subtle sense-making processes of the study’s participants crystallised when examining the themes evolving from the grounded thematic analysis, as well as macro discursive and specific rhetorical strategies employed by the social entrepreneurs. Here it gradually became clear that the participants engage in a process of core-framing tasks (Markowitz, 2007; Battilana et al., 2009) which consist of two distinct types of discursive strategies that pursue the final goal of depicting the social venture and its desire to achieve change in a constructive, and opponents as well as the status quo in a transformational or even destructive manner.

Underlying each of the three core-framing tasks that the participants in my sample enact are subliminal discursive strategies resting on two levels, descriptive and rhetorical (see Figure 2).15 The descriptive strategy explains the nascent social enterprise and its environment, i.e. the social

venture and the desired state as well as the status quo and opponents to change. Here, the social entrepreneurs elucidate their role as protagonist and juxtapose it with the opponents’ antagonistic role. Rhetorical strategies on the other hand refer to the logics that the entrepreneurs draw upon and are tied to institutional and contextual forces existent in the venture’s environment. Accordingly, they embrace the application of specific metanarratives and semantic categories. Metanarratives include descriptive discursive accounts, but go beyond: “[M]ore intentionally than narrative, metanarrative requires the integration of historical, sociological, psychological, cultural and contextual perspectives.” (Irving and Klenke, 2004: 30). On that account, metanarratives are important for connecting the individual organisational discourse to its broader

15 _{Both descriptive and rhetorical strategies are manifest in the data of the grounded thematic analysis. The}

context (Suddaby and Greenwood, 2005; Vaara et al., 2006). Semantic categories are a tool that was firstly described Van Leeuwen and Wodak (1999) in their seminal contribution on macro-level discursive legitimation strategies. Here, the authors identify four major semantic-linguistic categories of legitimation: (1) authorisation is legitimation by reference to authority, (2) rationalisation is legitimation by reference to either the utility of a practice (instrumental rationalisation) or to the facts of life (theoretical rationalisation), (3) moral evaluation is legitimation by reference to values, and (4) mythopoesis is legitimation achieved through the telling of stories (ib.). Both types of discursive strategies pursue the aim of constructing a favourable image of the social new venture and its change mission and transforming or even destroying respective images of the status quo and of the opponents to the venture’s mission. I elaborate on the core-framing tasks and the underlying descriptive and rhetorical strategies in the following sub-sections, fusing the analysis with a presentation of selected examples from my data.

DIAGNOSTIC FRAMING –THE STATUS QUO:BUREAUCRACY,INSTITUTIONALISM,BUSINESS

In the diagnostic framing stage, the status quo and entities of the ‘old world’ who oppose the social ventures’ goals and inhibit the accomplishment of their mission are identified as obstacles and are accordingly blamed within both descriptive and rhetorical strategies.

Descriptive Strategies

The disconnection from human values and needs and the unsustainability of the current system are determined as problem within the diagnostic framing task, with blame being put on the status quo and the old entities operating within it. Health Care for instance raises the idea of ‘old entities’ and their hypocrisy and ego-centrism:

[O]f course you have a very, you have in lots of companies the old way of thinking. Or not in companies but in institutions. […] But there are also many, you should also be aware that there are many companies, many institutions and they, they feel strong enough they don’t see the kind of rotten thing that’s inside them and how weak they actually are. […] [T]hey are thinking too much about their own position. And not enough about the broader playing field they’re operating in. Especially not enough about the broader development of society.

Table 6 Subliminal legitimation mechanisms - Diagnostic framing

Core-framing task

Strategy level Category title Themes/Means Illustrative Excerpts

Diagnostic Descriptive Status-quo Abidance

Old entities

Context

Consultancy: [B]ut sometimes, most of the times people have very closed paradigms. What they learned at school,

what they learned in their MBA course, whatever, what they learned in their company where they have been working for 40 years, well, that doesn't help you.

Service: They all know, they see the future is very uncertain because they see there's something dying and the

problem is if you're very much into it and very much if you don't want to let go of that and be curious about the new, then you probably gonna stay and hang on to the old, ehm, as much as you can.

Health Care: So, ehm when you have one part what I would call old thinking which is very much based on

institutions and on the of course on the nation state and so on and on the way of organising capitalism. And, ehm in which actually ehm those three fields, or even more fields, are very much separated.

Consultancy: And there is so much, we live in the craziest shifting times since, well yeah ages. And the shift, if you

are in the middle of it you don't see how much is shifting but, well, after 40 years or so if you look back and you say wow those first 10, 20 years of the third millennium, they were crazy. And there is so much moving. It's about fuel, it's about population, all the big things.

Service: I predict the change towards a more conscious way of producing, consuming, working [...] with all the

crises which have been around, with the financial crisis still very big, the climate crisis in the last 5 years has been [...] sounding the alarm bells or ehm...and I think that makes people wonder hey is that the right thing or not.

Rhetorical Status-quo Rationalisation

Evaluation

Metanarratives

Health Care : It’s interesting, banks seem to be so important to our economy and so we all paid a lot of money to

save them and now ehm the result is that they don’t do anymore what they are there for. They don’t give money anymore. Well, what do we need a bank for?

Service : [T]he whole thing that is now happening with the financial crisis just is doing what has been done before

but this is gonna break cause it doesn't work anymore, it really doesn't work. Ehm it really never made sense. Cause you need to actually ehm invest four, five Euros to make one Euro [...] so a society build on debts can never grow really. Because it's only, you're only growing in debt [...].

Consultancy: And ehm it's nonsense to have a company ehm with a maximum profit and a bad social impact. Health Care : And ehm I think many people really feel that [...] it doesn't work anymore. Because they feel, well I'm

making my money with this, but this doesn't help me and doesn't make me happy. [...] if your experiences in all these field are so different, then you almost have to be someone else in all those fields. And so, it leads to a sort of schizophrenia, ehm which feels bad.

Service: I think there's a lot of stupidity, ignorance [...] so out of the Industrial Revolution where there's a lot of

products and then more free time but ehm you want to consume more so you gonna work more […]. At the same time there are principles in which I do believe that we've got this planet, there's only one, and we're totally torturing it, and so torturing ourselves and then ehm it doesn't make sense.

Bureaucracy (rules, rationality, hierarchy, change-resistance), business (profit-orientation, growth, self-directed

world’ entities (row 1 of Table 6). The aim here is to create a sense of rejection towards opponents of the organisations’ goals. Similarly, the current situation is portrayed as unsustainable, creating clashes in society’s citizens and disconnecting the means from the purpose. Accordingly, Service depicts biases that the old system creates within persons who are part of it:

[I]f you look at a person in a corporate that has a, a, a family and a business. The business probably wouldn't really fit with the values you know, that's the way you do business. Like there are top pollution creators because of the way you do business. At the same time at their home they want to feed their kids very well and there is a clash in themselves I believe. And most of them really, ehm, find it very hard because it's, because usually they put their working mode on, and when they're home they try to be who they are again, as a father, as a lover, as a you know whatever. And then in business they're business and this is who they are. But the problem, they are, they're also human.

At the same time, the entrepreneurs illustrate the context of the current situation as being unstable and shifting. Hereby, they interweave the diagnosis of the problem with broader contextual factors independent of the perpetrator, which illuminates the external challenges posed to the status quo. These contextual descriptions are taken up in the later stages of prognostic and motivational framing as well. For an example see Health Care, who refers to a turning point in the current situation:

And that point I think we are at some sort, at a crossroad. It can go in a, in very different directions. Maybe we will develop into some sort of European China with a very authoritarian state and some sort of half, criminal half-state that system, of, of economical system. But we can maybe we can also find a new way to give meaning to democracy and to local communities and to make ourselves stronger. But then we should, I think it’s very important, the essential thing stays to, to try to, to ehm reunite these different fields. Reunite culture with economy, with social, with society and also ecological.

Rhetorical Strategies

bureaucracy, business and institutionalism and associated linguistic sets, which support the creation of an antagonist to the venture’s desired operations.

PROGNOSTIC AND MOTIVATIONAL FRAMING –THE SOCIAL VENTURE AND ITS CHANGE

MISSION:ENTREPRENEURSHIP,SOCIAL MISSION,NON-PROFIT

In the prognostic and motivational core-framing tasks, it is the social venture and its mission to achieve societal change which is portrayed as the solution to overcoming the diagnosed problem. Both descriptive and rhetorical strategies provide the venture’s environment with a rationale of why to support the nascent enterprise.

Descriptive Strategies

All of the ventures in my sample allude to the constraints inherent in wanting to change the existing situation. This is not only necessary to underscore the social venture’s protagonist image, fighting and succeeding against the odds, but moreover helps to create a sense of urgency that inspires activism on the recipient’s side (Fligstein, 1997). Consequently, Service illustrates constraints faced in the early start-up phase like this:

So in many ways when we started […] people said ah you're dreaming, you're naïve you know great but you know proof it […]. But nobody really took us serious, like they liked the idea but nobody really took us serious. […] Oh, well, oh that's because idealism has a really bad, ehm connotation. Like yeah idealism is great but you know it will never work. This is reality and this is how the world works and this is what it is, we've got to deal with it. And I just don't like the status-quo so I just wanna challenge it and actually show that yes, idealism is possible. And it is.

Accordingly, the way to overcome these barriers is depicted as needing to challenge the old, create visibility for alternative ways and build a new system that is a considerable improvement of the old status quo (see row 1 of Table 7).

Table 7 Subliminal legitimation mechanisms - Prognostic and motivational framing

Core-framing task

Strategy level Category title Themes/Means Illustrative Excerpts

Prognostic/ Motivational

Descriptive Change Constraints

Challenging the old Creating visibility Building the new

Health Care: [I]n general, it's very, if you want to do something, if you want to start a new thinking, in a, a field

which is defined by old thinking ehm it's very hard to, to keep focussed on, on what you're trying to do new. Because everyone will say oh we've seen this before or this doesn't make sense or it doesn't work [...].

Service: [A]nd here it's just ehm, I guess they're less conditioned or they're trying to kind of like all the constructs

of society that do not fit or that just do not make sense they're all just with a needle you can explode them and I guess that's what people start doing here.

Health Care: And what we actually said was the care for the elderly has been so much, this care for these elderly

has been so much influenced by all kinds of rules that, that something totally alien has, ehm, arisen or the situation is alien for everyone [...] And so we said we get rid of many of those rules and, and really well strive to make something of a community [...].

Service: So we got so far that you actually instead of talking about change you are actually being the change

already and that's a lot more powerful. So visibility and the fact that social entrepreneurship is possible and that kind of good businesses are possible. [...] If you make it visible then people start to see it and then they start to see it a lot more and then they start to believe hey that's a reality that's much bigger and I was oblivious to it.

Consultancy: So it's a, we are going to new business paradigms. And there is so much, we live in the craziest

shifting times since, well yeah ages. [...] And there is so much moving. It's about fuel, it's about population, all the big things. And they are way too big for [Consultancy ], but we are a molecule in it.

Social venture's distinctiveness Reflexivity Proactiveness Commitment People-focus

Service: [Yo]u know I can talk about social innovation but if people never heard about social innovation I would

never use that term or maybe I would explain what it is so then they, so that they kind of learn but ehm yeah I would usually try to understand who they are and then find the appropriate language.

Consultancy: [W]e said our core competence is to really shake up companies and situations. So we have said to

ourselves we are a, more an action agency than a consultancy. A consultancy says yeah you have to do this, and you have to do that and research shows this and this. And an action company says ok we do a quick scan and then we can really go to start moving with the company within weeks.

Health Care: Well I think the, the no it’s never sufficient because what you really need is also of course the

will-power to do something. And the passion, and you have to feel the urgency to say this is really necessary, we can’t let it go and we are really going to achieve this. If you don’t feel the necessity then I don’t think any, anything will work […].

Consultancy: [W]e have a real mission to, to ehm contribute to world improvement as we call it. [...] And if we

come in we also give a result guaranty. If nothing happens then we don't want to be paid.

Consultancy: You can be very rational in your analysis, if you don't connect to the energy and the passions of

people, you don't get people moving.

Health Care: [I]f we just look at people as if they're only consumers we only see just one part of them. [...] But

Table 7 (continued)

Rhetorical Change and social venture's distinctiveness

Rationalisation

Evaluation

Metanarratives

Health Care: Well the idea was to, the idea was to, to…well first of all that the quality of care would improve. That

the [deterioration] of the frailty, or of the sickness of the people who are in care, that that would be slowed down and the, the, I’ve seen the results and it really looks like it works [...] so it’s very nice. And ehm, finally the idea was that if we were doing this, with the same financial means we could have these better results.

Service: So they're moving more towards like how can we continue do what we do which is have impact but

somehow in a more business-minded way. There's nothing bad in business, it's just, it's just a way done, right? And so you see this movement happening a lot [...]. Business is a structure, it's a vehicle ehm and then I guess if you choose your vehicle to be clean and, and sustainable and build on a, in the right way you can still have a business.

Consultancy: Yes it's a social venture because we have a real mission to, to ehm contribute to world improvement

as we call it.

Service: Ehm it's about just being real, I guess. With everything that's in there which is very much longing for

safety and love and lalala and also for ehm pride and success and all of that but also kind of knowing that we're humans and with all our you know qualities and pitfalls. Ehm but you don't have to conform to something, you don't have to be something that you're not. [...] you've got the permission to actually contribute to society which is something that there's no real places, no real places outside [...].

Health Care: Ehm but I think the basic idea of getting the, the madness out of the system and, and recreate

communities and recreate connection and to relate to the experience of people. That is true, and it’s needed almost everywhere in the, the social field, I think almost everywhere in society.

Entrepreneurship (creativity, uniqueness, innovation, growth), social movement (sustainability, change,