Boundary conceptions, knowledge brokering and enabling processes: Tracing organizational learning in social enterprises

Abstract

In the.last two decades, the philanthropy-based social sector has seen the emergence of organizations exhibiting innovative and sustainable social value creation processes. These organizations, referred to as social enterprises, have been identified as highly experimental setups where much learning occurs but is not captured or shared. Being in its developmental stages, the field of social entrepreneurship has directed sparse attention to social enterprise learning processes. Most of the existing organizational learning literature has been developed from the commercial enterprise perspective. Significant differences exist between social and commercial enterprises which indicate that utilizing existing literature to explain learning in social enterprises might result in only a partial understanding to the neglect of the intricacies of the social enterprise. A grounded exploration of social enterprise leaming processes is necessary to enable application, extension and modificatio...