Venture Philanthropy and Practice Variations: The Interplay of Institutional Logics and Organizational Identities

Abstract

While institutional logics and organizational identity become effective theoretical lenses to analyze hybrid organizations, the literature often focuses on tensions between multiple logics or multiple identities and remains relatively silent regarding how logics and identities simultaneously constrain organizations and how organizations respond to incompatibilities as well as compatibilities between logic and identity. To address this gap, the present study draws from burgeoning research that theorizes identity as an integral part of the mechanism from which logics shape organizational decision making. I examined how social-welfare/commercial logics and social/businesslike identities directly and indirectly shape 138 organizations’ practices of venture philanthropy—a hybrid approach combining philanthropy and venture capitalism. The findings confirm identity’s overall mediating effects and offer new theoretical insights into organizational responses to logic–identity incompatibility, especially the dominant role of social identity in consistently suppressing external pressures from commercial logic, whereas businesslike identity overcomes social-welfare logic only associated with the nonprofit status.

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