Mission Control: Examining the Institutionalization of New Legal Forms of Social Enterprise in Different Strategic Action Fields

Abstract

During the first decade of the 21st century, new legal forms for socially motivated business enterprises have emerged in the UK and in the US creating new options for businesses active in social enterprise activities. In this chapter I examine three efforts to create new platforms for social business: the community interest company or CIC (UK), the low profit limited liability company or L3C (US) and the B Corporation (US) through the lens of social movement theory, exploring the efforts to institutionalize these new legal forms as social movements occurring in different strategic fields of action (Fligstein and McAdam, 2011). Building on recent efforts to bridge social movement analysis with organizational theory (Davis et al., 2005), this chapter includes a stakeholder analysis of each new model to sharpen the comparative focus of the investigation of the early efforts to institutionalize these new legal forms for social enterprise. Such an approach assumes that the institutionalization process is shaped both by specific characteristics of organizational form and by the larger environmental conditions surrounding the efforts to codify new legal forms and promote their use.

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