Building Cross-Sector Collaboration and Managing Institutional Tensions in Social Enterprise Organizations

Abstract Social enterprises face complex institutional logics due to their focus on both economic and social goals, resulting in institutional tensions. Interorganizational collaboration is a strategy to cope with environmental turbulence and complexity. Guided by institutional theory and the literature on interorganizational collaboration, this study examines the role of partnership building in managing institutional tensions and hybrid organizational forms undertaken by social enterprise organizations. With interview data collected from 15 social enterprises in a southeastern state in the USA, this study demonstrates that the majority of the sampled organizations reported experiencing organizing and learning tensions while a couple reported performing and belonging tensions. Organizations leveraged specific cross-sector partnerships to obtain legitimacy and sustain their businesses. A typology of partnerships (community engagement, resource acquisition, and dual-value) is proposed based on organizational forms and activities undertaken by various SEs to manage these tensions.