The Emotional Foundations of Social Enterprises

Emotions are vital in the mobilization of support for social enterprises because they energize key stakeholders to pursue the missions of these organizations. Even though emotions are important for social enterprises, we still need to improve our understanding of emotions within and around them. Further, we need to improve our understanding of opportunities and challenges that can emerge as social enterprises attempt to energize volunteers, employees, clients and funders. Building on sociological work on emotions, I discuss a framework that explains the manifestation of emotions in social enterprises. This framework provides a deeper understanding of emotions in these organizations and uncovers scaling-up challenges that are relatively unknown in comparison to the well-explored challenges of balancing social and financial objectives.

Bio

Diego Moreira Soares is a PhD Student in Management (Organizational Behaviour) at Queen's University, Canada. His research interests lie in the domain of institutional theory, with a specific focus on how institutional arrangements impact social change.