Walking the Values Tightrope
Walking the Values Tightrope
The Moral Ambivalence of Social Enterprise
This chapter explains how NPower worked to institutionalize their entrepreneurial approach to nonprofit technology by expanding and replicating their model nationally. This chapter illustrates how organizations translate existing models to local environments while maintaining enough similarity to the original as to be recognizable as such. Here, I present data from a longitudinal organizational ethnography at the NPower office in New York, the first and arguably most successful affiliate of the NPower national expansion. This chapter explains moral ambivalence, the tension created by the entrepreneurial strategy of combining social and economic values. Moral ambivalence forces hybrid organizations, like social enterprises, to appeal to multiple stakeholders simultaneously expanding moral legitimacy. However, such a strategy also makes the organization vulnerable to moral legitimacy challenges from other actors, in this case members of the Circuit Rider movement.
Keywords: Social Enterprise, Hybrid Organizations, Moral Ambivalence, Legitimacy, Markets, Nonprofit Organizations, Institutions
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