Operations strategy of social enterprises: resources, practices and capabilities

• Autor(a) principal: Ávila, Liliana de Fátima Luís
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositórios Científicos de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (RCAAP)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/28283
• topic: Operations strategy; Social enterprises; Hybrid organisations; Organisational identity; Resources; Operational practices; Operational capabilities

In the last years, social enterprises have emerged as an important element in the organisational landscape and in the response to social challenges. These organisations, also acknowledged in the literature as hybrid organisations, are characterized essentially by a dual organisational identity, combining social and economic aims under the same organisational structure. This duality of objectives that characterizes social enterprises challenges the existing knowledge on operations strategy, as it raises questions about the objectives to which the operations function must respond, as well as about the existing resources and practices at the operational level which lead to the development of distinctive operational capabilities. Thus, the main objective of this research work is to understand how social configure their operations strategy. In order to meet this objective, it was conducted an exploratory study, adopting a mixed methods research approach. In a first instance, a taxonomy was developed aiming to characterize social enterprises in Portugal according to their organisational identity. Afterwards, case studies were conducted in social enterprises with different characteristics to understand how they configure their resources and practices in order to develop distinctive capabilities. The results suggest the existence of four social enterprise profiles, exhibiting different levels of commitment towards social and market aspects, as well as differences in terms of mission characteristics and performance. Regarding their operations strategy, community engagement is identified as one of the operational performance dimensions of such organisations. However, they tend to combine multiple operational performance dimensions as a response to conflicting demands. Motivated by resources constraints and the benefits associated with the existence of a collaborative environment, social enterprises adopt a greater diversity of practices aiming the development of improvement and cooperation capabilities. Their specificities also lead to the development of the mobilization of resources capability and the openness capability.