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Over the last decades corporate irresponsibility has gained increasing interest among practitioners and researchers. Corporate irresponsibility is often the result of intentionally irresponsible strategies, decisions, or actions, which negatively affect an identifiable stakeholder or environment. For instance, these range from the violation of the human rights and labor standards to environmental damages. Organizations enacting irresponsible practices rely on different factors upon multiple levels (field, organizational, individual) and its interrelations as well as processes evolving within the organization leading to such behavior. However, reasons for the occurrence of and explanations for corporate irresponsibility so far have been limited, leaving a fragmented understanding of this phenomenon. This dissertation helps to improve the understanding and explanation of corporate irresponsibility by identifying driving patterns of corporate irresponsibility and showing how the interactions across multiple levels add to this phenomenon. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the topic of corporate irresponsibility, the theoretical approaches of this dissertation and an introduction to the chapters. The second chapter offers a review and analysis of the corporate irresponsibility literature. The chapter presents a variance model outlining the concept, antecedents, moderators and outcomes of recent corporate irresponsibility literature as well as the different factors across levels (field, organizational, individual). Chapter 2 offers a critical analysis of what we know by referring to current literature and offers insights on what we don´t know by deriving main implications for future research on corporate irresponsibility. Chapter 3 enlarges the understanding of corporate irresponsibility introducing a process approach to explain how corporate irresponsibility evolves over time and under which conditions. Based on a qualitative meta-analysis findings converge around two distinct process paths of corporate irresponsibility, the opportunistic-proactive, and, the emerging-reactive, subdivided into three phases. Chapter 3 sheds different lights upon the phases of corporate irresponsibility and its underlying mechanisms. The final chapter 4 focuses on different underlying mechanisms driving the final downfall or demise of organizations, organizational failure. Chapter 4 offers an alternative explanation to the competing extremism and inertia mechanisms driving organizational failure in recent studies by suggesting that these explanations are rather complementary. In addition, chapter 4 enlarges the explanation of organizational failure identifying the role of conflict mechanisms and its interplay with rigidity mechanisms. In sum, this dissertation contributes to a better understanding of what causes and increases corporate irresponsibility, and a better explanation of how and why corporate irresponsibility and organizational failure emerges, develops, grows or terminates over time. Hopefully all three articles motivate more research on this important topic to prevent such behavior in advance. 4
Scaling Strategies of Social Entrepreneurship Organizations – an Actor-Motivation Perspective
(2014)
Despite their sometimes ingenious solutions, many social entrepreneurs fail to scale which is at odds with their overall objective of social change. Yet, though considered highly important in practice, scaling is still under-researched. Taking this imbalance as a starting point, my PhD thesis contributes to the social entrepreneurship literature by shedding new light on the role of the actor-motivation in scaling social ventures. Put together, papers 1-3 try to answer the general research questions of how do actors and their specific motivations, particularly the social entrepreneur, influence the scaling strategies (and success) of social ventures? Based on a brief review of the literature on scaling, I identify social franchising as a promising scaling strategy that requires more research. Here, paper 1 argues that the social mission of the involved actors can serve as an informal functional equivalent to formal contracts as well as a means to safeguard the local small group logic. Paper 2 discusses the effects of stewardship on social franchising coming to the conclusion that stewardship relationships may impede speed of and degree of scaling. Based on these insights, paper 3 more closely analyzes the motivations of social entrepreneurs in a post-founding stage. It empirically constructs a taxonomy of (social) entrepreneurs based on their motivations. To this end, paper 3 employs a three-step methodological approach that combines the inductive insights from 80 interviews with entrepreneurs with a statistical cluster analysis. Following, this paper then discusses contributions of and implications for scaling research as well as to social entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship, and management research.
