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How to Heed BlackRock's Call for Corporate Social Responsibility

by Julie Battilana

BlackRock's Larry Fink is challenging CEOs to serve a social purpose as well as a financial one. Institutional change expert Julie Battilana discusses what it will take to create this "transformation of capitalism." Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

How Does a Social Startup Decide to Commercialize? It May Depend on the Founder's Gender

by Carmen Nobel

How does the founder of a social venture decide to create a "hybrid" business rather than a traditional nonprofit organization? The decision has a lot to do with the founder’s gender, according to new research by Stefan Dimitriadis, Matthew Lee, Lakshmi Ramarajan, and Julie Battilana. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

The Three Types of Leaders Who Create Radical Change

by Carmen Nobel

Every successful social movement requires three distinct leadership roles: the agitator, the innovator, and the orchestrator, according to institutional change expert Julie Battilana. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

What to Do When Your Organization Has Dueling Missions

by Carmen Nobel

It’s no easy feat to manage hybrid organizations, which combine the social mission of a nonprofit with the revenue model of a for-profit business. Julie Battilana and colleagues explain how hybrids can find success with a business model dubbed “spaces of negotiation.” Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

How the Zebra Got Its Stripes: Imprinting of Individuals and Hybrid Social Ventures

by Matthew Lee & Julie Battilana

Creating hybrid organizations that combine existing organizational forms is a complex process. Given the legitimacy challenges facing hybrid organizations, why are they created in the first place? The authors focus on the role of "environmental imprinting" on individuals: this means the persistent effects that individuals' environments during sensitive periods have on their subsequent behaviors. After constructing and analyzing a novel dataset of over 700 founders of social ventures, all guided by a social welfare logic, the authors suggest that individual imprinting helps to explain why an entrepreneur founding a social venture might create a hybrid by incorporating a secondary, commercial logic. Overall, the paper contributes to the understanding of hybrid organizations by providing the first large-scale, empirical examination of the antecedents of the widely-discussed type of hybrids that combine social welfare and commercial logics. Key concepts include: Environmental imprinting refers to the effects that characteristics of individuals' environments during sensitive periods have on their subsequent behaviors. Entrepreneurs' direct exposure to various work environments through their own experience influences their likelihood to create a new hybrid venture. The findings contribute to institutional theory more generally by showing how environmental imprints on individuals may enable divergence from current, institutionalized structures, as well as how the contours of such imprints may vary with characteristics such as tenure and type of exposure. Closed for comment; 0 Comment(s) posted.

‘Hybrid’ Organizations a Difficult Bet for Entrepreneurs

by Michael Blanding

Hybrid organizations combine the social logic of a nonprofit with the commercial logic of a for-profit business, but are very difficult to finance. So why would anyone want to form one? Julie Battilana and Matthew Lee investigate. Closed for comment; 14 Comment(s) posted.

Analyzing Institutions to Solve Big Problems

by Carmen Nobel & Anna Secino

The academic study of institutions provides important insights into complex problems, but is often criticized for lacking practical relevance. Institutional theorists gathered at Harvard Business School to discuss how to make their work more broadly understood and useful. Closed for comment; 2 Comment(s) posted.

Beyond Heroic Entrepreneurs

by Carmen Nobel

Research in progress by Harvard Business School's Julie Battilana and Matthew Lee reveals that a large number of social entrepreneurs are focused on local rather than global change, and on sustainable funding. Closed for comment; 7 Comment(s) posted.

How ‘Hybrid’ Nonprofits Can Stay on Mission

by Carmen Nobel

As nonprofits add more for-profit elements to their business models, they can suffer mission drift. Associate Professor Julie Battilana says hybrid organizations can stay on target if they focus on two factors: the employees they hire and the way they socialize those employees. Key concepts include: In order to avoid mission drift, hybrid organizations need to focus on whom they hire and whether their employees are open to socialization. Because early socialization is so important, hybrid firms may be better off hiring new college graduates with no work background rather than a mix of seasoned bankers and social workers. The longer their tenure in a hybrid organization, the more likely top managers may be to hire junior people. Closed for comment; 14 Comment(s) posted.

Acting Globally but Thinking Locally? The Influence of Local Communities on Organizations

by Christopher Marquis & Julie Battilana

It is a paradox that in a globalizing and "boundaryless" economy, factors associated with local communities—such as interpersonal networks, laws, and tax rates, among others—remain important for understanding organizational behavior. As Marquis and Battilana argue, communities influence organizational behavior not only as local markets and resource environments, but also through a number of institutional pressures. Focusing on communities as institutional environments provides fresh theoretical insights into organizational behavior, in addition to offering a more unified perspective to the diverse set of research that is emerging on local communities. Key concepts include: Despite globalization, local factors remain important, and in many ways local particularities have become more visible and salient as globalization has proceeded. In today's environment, organizations are embedded both locally and globally. Researchers need to account for these different levels in order to understand organizational behavior and also perhaps advance theory. Closed for comment; 0 Comment(s) posted.

Initiating Divergent Organizational Change: The Enabling Role of Actors’ Social Position

by Julie Battilana

Does social position influence the ability to launch groundbreaking organizational projects? This study investigates that question as well as whether workers' social position in their professional field affects their ability to begin such projects. Using data based on more than ninety clinical managers in the United Kingdom's National Health Service, Battilana studied initiatives such as the development of an alternative to hospitalization for older people and another that would shift role division by transferring decision-making power from physicians to nurses. Her results indicate that social position is an important condition at the heart of organizational change. Key concepts include: A worker's social position is an important condition for their likelihood of initiating important new projects in organizations. Social position is a deciding factor in which types of changes may be made. Within the spectrum of social positions, the characteristics of people who are more likely to initiate such new projects are quite different depending on the type of change project that is considered. Closed for comment; 0 Comment(s) posted.