%0 Journal Article
%T From Balancing Missions to Mission Drift: The Role of the Institutional Context, Spaces, and Compartmentalization in the Scaling of Social Enterprises
%A Johanna Winter
%A M. Paola Ometto
%A Royston Greenwood
%A Thomas Gegenhuber
%J Business & Society
%@ 1552-4205
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/0007650318758329
%X In this article, we explain the mechanisms that allow social enterprises to balance their missions, and the risk of mission drift as organizations grow. We empirically explore Incubator-BUS (I-BUS), a student organization within a private Brazilian university, which sought to incubate cooperatives for vulnerable groups. Although initially successful in balancing its missions, I-BUS then failed. We show how scaling-up can complicate the balancing of different missions within the same organization. We propose that, to balance their missions, social enterprises¡ªespecially recently formed and democratically managed enterprises¡ªneed not only ¡°spaces of negotiation,¡± as suggested in the literature, but also ¡°herding spaces¡± that connect an organization to its institutional context. We indicate why herding spaces are critical, but then show how scaling-up can result in organizational ¡°compartmentalization¡± that undermines them
%K incubator
%K mission drift
%K scaling
%K social enterprise
%K spaces
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0007650318758329