Despite considerable progress that organizations have made during the past 20 years to increase the representation of women at board level, they still hold few board seats. Drawing on a qualitative study involving 30 companies with women directors in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Ghana, we investigate how the relationship between gender in the boardroom and corporate governance operates. The findings indicate that the presence of a minority of women on the board has an insignificant effect on board performance. Yet the chairperson's role is vital in leading the change for recruiting and evaluating candidates and their commitment to the board with diversity and governance in mind. Our study also sheds light on the multifaceted reasons why women directors appear to be resisting the discourse of gender quotas. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
In the context of incubators, particularly those that are driven to achieving social objectives, this paper investigates core processes that support the development of social innovation. Social innovation, as this paper argues, is underpinned by a new form of social collaboration and engagement built upon strong forms of sharing knowledge and learning. Coupled with this is the element of social capital reinforced by entrepreneurship and leadership that promotes sustainability in the community. These factors drive innovative thinking and ways of engaging among stakeholders in order to create new forms of socio-economic impact. Such value-creating activity occurs in firms that operate within incubators involving a wide range of stakeholders who work through networks to co-create and meet social challenges. Through a case study of a social incubator and an incubatee, we demonstrate the core processes that irradiate the argument on social innovation. The contribution of this paper is threefold: First, social innovation is an emerging area of research, of which there is a dearth in terms of examining the processes empirically. We address the gap in this field by demonstrating the value of social collaboration and engagement using different innovation models. Second, we establish links between social innovation and incubation using the concept of social capital. This allows us to achieve our third contribution: exemplification of a dyadic value-based partnership and collaboration processes between an incubator and an incubatee, through activities driven by social innovation that aim to have social impact. The paper concludes with practice implications and suggests directions for future research.
Scholars have characterized social entrepreneurship as an “accumulative fragmentalism,” primarily characterized by the use of case studies featuring prominent and innovative profiles of social enterprises and entrepreneurs. However, today, social entrepreneurship is between cross‐currents. On the one hand, it seeks, as a subfield, to solidify its theoretical and methodological underpinnings and standpoints. On the other hand, it is consistently exposed to field expansion, given that a number of its underlying frameworks, commonly shared with other fields (such as sustainability and corporate social responsibility [CSR]), are opening up to wider vistas of conceptualization and theorization. This is often through the influence of practice as well as theory. The contribution of the paper is threefold. First, it enhances our understanding of social entrepreneurship field development by identifying cross‐currents and by highlighting new angles for paradigmatic and theoretical positioning. Second, it implements a framework that scholars previously employed within the original field of entrepreneurship (Bourdieu's theory of capitals and their transformations); in doing so, it also proceeds to propose an enrichment to the framework by including additional capitals that are specifically relevant for the field of social entrepreneurship and that are influenced by common agendas, as those exist in the fields of sustainability and CSR. Third, it offers insights for theory, as well as practice, which relate to understandings from the first two contributions.
This article examines how agency should be conceptualized to manage the pressing problems of the Anthropocene in support of sustainable change. The article reviews and analyzes literature on agency in relation to planetary boundaries, advancing the relational view of agency in which no actors are granted a primary ontological status, and agency is not limited to humans but may be attributed to other actors. This understanding of agency can effectively contribute to sustainable organizations; on the one hand, it enables non-anthropocentrism and on the other hand, admits that networks bind actors. We conclude that boundary blurring (between actors) and boundary formation (between actors and networks) are complementary processes. Consequently, relationality is proposed as an applicable means of respecting planetary boundaries, while recognizing that all action flows through circuits of power whose obligatory passage points are the major conduits for intervention. Intervention occurs through regulation and nudging action such as ecotaxation.
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