محرک ارزش های کسب و کار اجتماعی: چشم انداز مدل کسب و کار Value drivers of social businesses: A business model perspective

Introduction Solving grand societal challenges, such as global poverty, gender and race inequalities, illiteracy, and climate catastrophes, is one of the most important contributions our generation can make. While many NGOs, foundations, and associations dedicate themselves to one or more of these social challenges, an increasing number of social businesses seek to combine a commercial business role with a similar social mission (Porter and Kramer, 2006, 2011). Furthermore, consumers increasingly require brands to not only offer products and services with functional benefits, but to also make social contributions (Vilá and Bharadwaj, 2017). Social businesses need to combine two or more institutional logics: While they strive for commercial performance, they also want to address a social purpose (Mair et al., 2015; Santos et al., 2015). In general, institutional logics guide and shape organizational members’ cognition and behaviors of (Friedland and Alford, 1991; Thornton et al., 2012). Thus, navigating institutional plurality potentially creates conflicts and rivalry between each logic’s competing goals (Jay, 2013; Mair et al., 2015). Business models have emerged as a cognitive instrument for managers to make sense of the logic of how a firm creates and captures value (Baden-Fuller and Haefliger, 2013; Martins et al., 2015). While business models originally focused solely on commercial value, it has recently been argued that the concept is capable of considering different constellations of institutional logics (Laasch, 2017; Ocasio and Radoynovska, 2016). Social business models have received little, although increasing, attention in the business model literature (e.g., Seelos and Mair, 2007; Wilson and Post, 2013; Yunus et al., 2010). The analysis of social business from a business model perspective is favorable for two reasons: first, business models are as interdisciplinary as researching social business is (or needs to be); second, business models emphasize the logic of inherent value creation by analyzing its effects (Abdelkafi and Täuscher, 2016; Schaltegger et al., 2016). To date, the literature has failed to integrate different approaches to conceptualize social business models within a shared theoretical framework. We therefore identify two main gaps in the literature. First, empirically and theoretically, it remains unclear what distinguishes a social business model from a traditional one. While academics increasingly agree that business model research has solid theoretical foundations (Amit and Zott, 2015; Spieth et al., 2014; Wirtz et al., 2016; Zott and Amit, 2013), the institutional integration of social elements into the business model concept is still in its infancy (Bocken et al., 2014; Sabatier et al., 2017; Seelos et al., 2011; Wilson and Post, 2013). Second, whereas pioneering studies in this domain consistently highlighted that social business models should follow a clear social mission and should configure resources in a way that allows the organization to be economically self-sustaining (Seelos and Mair, 2007; Wilson and Post, 2013; Yunus et al., 2010), social business’s underlying value drivers have not yet been identified. The term value driver refers to the sources of value and the factors that enhance the total value that the firm creates (Amit and Zott, 2001). The particular influence that social business’s multiple institutional logics have on these value drivers has not yet been explored.