No abstract

Social enterprises pursue a dual mission: on the one hand, they strive for social purpose, while on the other, they try to achieve economic stability despite scarce resources. To achieve the dual mission, social enterprises avail themselves of both for-profit and non-profit institutional logics. Due to this combination of multiple institutional logics, such enterprises can be classified as hybrid organizations. This study focuses on these organizations and investigates tensions between social enterprises and various stakeholder groups caused by the use of commercial logics within the social sector. In particular, we examine the perception of commercial versus social welfare logics by various stakeholder groups, and investigate the effects on organizational communication. Our study is centered on social franchise enterprises. We use an exploratory qualitative research approach based on semi-structured interviews with 21 social franchisors and social franchisees of seven social franchise enterprises. Our main results suggest that the use of commercial logics in the social sector tends to decrease the legitimacy of social franchise enterprises in the eyes of internal stakeholders, the general public, and various (but not all) external stakeholder groups. Many stakeholders of social franchise enterprises show a strong aversion to commercial logics, and particularly to commercial terminology. Overall, we conclude that social franchise enterprises very consciously apply commercial and social welfare logics and use alternative terminology where necessary to retain legitimacy and prevent tensions.

No abstract

Startups typically have no positive cash flow, little collateral to offer, and high bankruptcy rates. As a result, they seem to be poor loan candidates. However, venture loans as hybrid form financing that include a loan and a warrant are used in practice. We focus on this distinct form of venture debt and identify characteristics of startups and their financing history that are related to their probability of receiving a venture loan. We use an unbalanced panel data sample of 13,540 companies that have conducted 27,577 financing rounds. Our key finding is that venture loans are associated with strongly committed existing investors, which stimulates the requirements of venture lenders and is signaled through large invested capital amounts per investor in previous rounds. Furthermore, we find that venture loans are associated with rather mature startups and offer empirical indication that the medical, health, and life science industry with clear milestones provides good conditions for venture loans.