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Social entrepreneurship increasingly involves collective, voluntary organizing efforts where success depends on generating and sustaining members' participation. To investigate how such participatory social ventures achieve member engagement in pluralistic institutional settings, we conducted a qualitative, inductive study of German Renewable Energy Source Cooperatives (RESCoops). Our findings show how value tensions emerge from differences in RESCoop members' relative prioritization of community, environmental, and commercial logics, and how cooperative leaders manage these tensions and sustain member participation through temporal, structural, and collaborative compromise strategies. We unpack the mechanisms by which each strategy enables members to justify organizational decisions that violate their personal value priorities and demonstrate their varying implications for organizational growth. Our findings contribute new insights into the challenges of collective social entrepreneurship, the capacity of hybrid organizing strategies to mitigate value concessions, and the importance of logic combinability as a key dimension of pluralistic institutional settings.

As complex, intractable social problems continue to intensify, organizations increasingly respond with novel approaches that bridge multiple institutional spheres and combine forms, identities, and logics that would conventionally not go together, creating hybridity. Scholarly research on this phenomenon has expanded in tandem, raising questions about how the concept of organizational hybridity can maintain analytical clarity while accommodating a diverse range of empirical manifestations. Reviewing and integrating extant literature, the authors argue that to achieve both analytical rigor and real-world relevance, research must account for variation in how hybridity is organizationally configured, temporally situated, and institutionally embedded. The authors develop a framework that captures this heterogeneity and discuss three key implications for hybridity research: drawing on multiple theoretical lenses, examining varied empirical contexts, and adopting multi-level and dynamic perspectives.

As firms increasingly adopt a corporate purpose, there is substantial variation in what this turn to purpose actually entails and divergent views about whether and how firms can realize their purpose aspirations. To capture this variation and analyze its implications for enacting purpose, we leverage three existing bodies of research in organization and management theory: Early organization theory illuminates uses of purpose to convey an organization’s overarching reason for being, organizational hybridity sheds light on purpose as an alternative organizational objective to profit maximization, and systems perspectives offer tools for explaining purpose as a catalyst of systemic change beyond the boundaries of the firm. The typology that we develop based on these three bodies of research provides analytical clarity about distinct facets of the corporate purpose phenomenon and surfaces complementary insights into challenges and opportunities associated with purpose enactment. In doing so, it illuminates the value of drawing on existing organization and management theories for advancing corporate purpose scholarship and provides a springboard for future research. History: This paper has been accepted for the Strategy Science Special Issue on Corporate Purpose.

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