The bright side of hybridity: exploring how social enterprises manage and leverage their hybrid nature

Abstract

In the last fifteen years, social enterprises have acquired growing centrality in the academic debate due to their recognized capacity to adopt business ventures to address deep-seated societal problems such as unemployment, poverty, and environmental damage (Smith, Gonin, & Besharov, 2014). The Journal of Business Ethics has been at the forefront of this debate, sparking the discussion, already in 2012, with the special issue “Social Entrepreneurship in Theory and Practice” (Pless 2012), which has adopted a very pragmatic perspective in studying the most practical constituencies of social entrepreneurship. Building on this seminal ground, in 2016 another special issue— Social Entrepreneurship and Business Ethics: Does Social Equal Ethical?” (Chell et al. 2016)—has opened an interesting route of research investigating specifically the ethical background of social enterprising (Chell etal. 2016), problematizing the ethical stance of the entrepreneur (Bacq et al. 2016; Dey and Steyaert 2014; Smith et al. 2016) and of the enterprise (André and Pache 2016).