Abstract

Social enterprises – hybrid organizations that combine seemingly incompatible social mission and commercial logics – can generate novel solutions to pressing social problems. Yet sustaining these dual logics in one organization over time remains challenging. Drawing on paradox research, the authors argue that organizations can effectively do so by combining features that both differentiate and integrate logics. Differentiating involves organizational features that encourage distinctions and separations across logics, while integrating involves features that encourage synergies. The authors show how dual logics can be differentiated and integrated at the individual, group, and organizational levels. Using examples from recent social enterprise research, they build a framework for sustaining hybridity in social enterprises that illustrates the value of adopting features that both differentiate logics and integrate logics, and highlights varied configurations for doing so. Based on this analysis, they propose a research agenda for exploring in greater depth how differentiating and integrating can sustain social enterprises and support social innovation and hybridity more broadly.