This study focused on how rural communities adopted consociational mechanisms to organize collective entrepreneurship, addressing the conflicts across the divergent social groups toward a convergent process that allows different entrepreneurs to fold into a grand coalition. It extended the theory of consociation from political science to the field of social entrepreneurship and inductively theorized the dimensional mechanisms based on the collective entrepreneurial effort of Yuan village in Shaanxi province of China. The results demonstrated four streams of consociational mechanisms: (1) emancipation to empower the vulnerable groups, (2) reconciliation of divergent interests, (3) reflection learning to generate reciprocity, and (4) proportional participation to institutionalize a hierarchical order in the community. These results advance the consociation theory and the organization of social change literature with strong policy implications.

As social innovations that help to transition towards a more sustainable food system, alternative food networks (AFNs) in China have attracted much scholarly attention in recent years. However, studies of the community building behavior of AFNs at the micro-level in the Chinese social context are scant. Through in-depth case studies conducted between 2017 and 2021 and social network analysis, our study examines how founders of AFNs successfully facilitate community building among their customers. We find that in China, the traditional social-cultural construct, guanxi, plays a critical role in AFNs’ community formation and expansion. The study identifies a three-stage framework for understanding the community building process of AFNs. First, a group of guanxi of the same kind would form a guanxi-circle. Second, the initial guanxi-circle is enhanced and expanded to multiple secondary guanxi-circles. Third, these multiple guanxi-circles together and the interactions among them constitute the community of AFNs. We argue that to strengthen the community, AFNs operators should inspire key members to form secondary guanxi-circles by enhancing their cognitive trust and emotional trust.