Delivering value to consumers is a key challenge faced by social enterprises in emerging markets in which local social structures govern access to markets. We investigate how caste, a hierarchical social structure, impacts value delivered to consumers. Using data on 160,963 service provider-consumer transactions in rural India, we theorize that caste-based homophily occurs when the service provider and consumer are in the same caste category, and this results in 58% more value delivered compared to caste-mismatch interactions. However, if a consumer is disadvantaged due to physical disability or cognitive vulnerability, the value delivered by the service providers of the same caste category is reduced by 60%, while the value delivered by service providers in a lower caste category is increased substantially, by more than 6 times. Our findings uncover the nuanced role of caste and highlight pathways for leveraging local social structures to reduce inequalities and foster inclusive value delivery.
An empirical literature on caste in Indian firms - boards, CEOs, capital and labour intermediaries - has emerged in management journals over the past decade. This commentary reads the field's findings against what economics has long established and asks what comes next.
Organizational identity shapes how ventures define who they are and become; however, we know little about how identity evolves in social ventures over time. This gap is important because social ventures continually negotiate social purpose and financial sustainability while responding to shifting stakeholder and institutional expectations. Based on an 8-year inductive study of an impact investing venture, we examine how venture identity and an emerging field co-evolve. Our findings identify four phases of identity evolution: experimentation, institutionalization, maturation, and scaling. Rather than replacing earlier identity claims, the venture cumulatively layered new meanings onto them, preserving, reinterpreting, and extending prior commitments while maintaining coherence across changing contexts. As the venture articulated and refined its identity, it also shaped shared understandings of impact investing, allowing venture identity and field formation to develop together. We contribute to organizational identity research by theorizing identity evolution as a recursive process of adaptation, persistence, and cumulative layering.
Universities face seemingly intractable challenges in achieving major long-term sustainability goals, despite their impressive capabilities in research and teaching. We propose concrete ways universities and, in particular, business schools, their faculty and staff, and their administrations can leverage the very challenges that plague progress by building on momentum in untapped structural and communication opportunities, existing work of insider change agents, and the psychology and practicality of small wins.
We investigate the collective interactions between corporate land use and biodiversity using the lenses of the metacoupling framework. Focusing on corporations in English and Welsh local councils between 2014 and 2019, we find that land use by intensive land use corporations is associated with reduced local species richness through intracoupling processes and causes negative outward spillover interactions with species richness in neighbouring areas via pericoupling processes. These intra- and pericoupling effects are stronger for ectotherms, small-bodied, and low-dispersal species. We also find telecoupling effects where declines in ectotherms, terrestrial species, small-bodied species, and low-dispersal species richness intensify when local councils are part of the neighbouring, regional, and national road and rail network. International connections via seaports and airports are associated with reduced endotherm richness. By adding a spatial dimension to the analysis, this study outlines the importance of tracing the impacts of corporate activities beyond their conventional firm boundaries.
