Organizations Driving Positive Social Change

Abstract

Academic and practitioner interest in how market-based organizations can drive positive social change (PSC) is steadily growing. This paper helps to recast how organizations relate to society. It integrates research on projects stimulating PSC-the transformational processes to advance societal well-being-that is fragmented across different streams of research in management andAcknowledgments: The second and third authors contributed equally to this manuscript. The authors are grateful for the excellent friendly reviews and comments provided by Ian Macdonald, Andreana Drencheva, and Tima Bansal to previous versions of this manuscript. Tima Bansal, Pamela Laughland, Rob Briner, Jo Rick, and Our societies face growing challenges in areas such as public health, education, social inequality, and environmental pollution. Market-based organizations can play an important role in addressing these challenges by stimulating transformational processes to advance societal well-being, referred to in this paper as creating positive social change (PSC). Popular management concepts such as "shared value" (Porter & Kramer, 2011), "inclusive growth" (George, McGahan, & Prabhu, 2012), and "base of the pyramid" (BoP) markets (Prahalad & Hart, 2002) reflect this potential and associate a range of organizational activities with PSC. Firms such as Unilever or Walmart initiate PSC projects to "do good and well" (Bansal & DesJardine, 2014), social enterprises leverage market-based activities to more effectively alleviate societal challenges (Mair & Marti, 2006), and investors seek to instigate social change while generating economic returns (Mair & Hehenberger, 2014).Management research on these phenomena is on the rise but remains fragmented. It mainly focuses inward on organizational activities and rarely explores how these activities may have external effects stimulating societal well-being beyond organizational boundaries. The extensive research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) focuses largely on understanding why and under which conditions firms engage in socially responsible activity and how such activity affects their financial performance (Aguinis & Glavas, 2012;Carroll & Shabana, 2010). The increasingly popular research on social enterprises pays attention to possible tensions that arise from pursuing multiple and potentially competing goals (e.g., Besharov & Smith, 2014) and elaborates on their unique organizational structures, identity, and governance (Mair, Mayer, & Lutz, 2015; Wry & York, in press). Research on business activity at the BoP focuses on identifying new market opportunities (Prahalad & Hart, 2002), developing new business models (Seelos & Mair, 2007), and building inclusive markets (Mair, Marti, & Ventresca, 2012).The tendency to introduce and hang on to distinct labels to demark the uniqueness of research areas hinders building cumulative knowledge on market-based activity and PSC across these different research streams. And the inward focus of these research streams limits their contribution to unde...

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