MGMT 9000M Week 5 Findings Chapter Example

Four Findings, Counted and Sourced, and One Owner Who Chose Otherwise: A Findings Chapter Excerpt From a Multiple Case Study of How Owners of Six Small Social Enterprises Handle Conflicts Between Mission and Margin, Reporting What Happened Without Saying Why

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Walden University

MGMT 9000M: Doctoral Dissertation

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Month Day, Year

Four Findings, Counted and Sourced, and One Owner Who Chose Otherwise: A Findings Chapter Excerpt From a Multiple Case Study of How Owners of Six Small Social Enterprises Handle Conflicts Between Mission and Margin, Reporting What Happened Without Saying Why

The Cases and Their Data

This chapter reports findings from six small social enterprises, firms that pursue a social or environmental mission through commercial activity, each with fewer than 60 employees. Battilana and Lee (2014) describe such organizations as hybrids that combine forms usually kept apart, which is why conflicts between mission and margin are routine for them. The six cases are identified by letter. Case A is a coffee roaster buying from smallholder cooperatives; Case B a commercial cleaning firm employing people leaving incarceration; Case C a furniture maker using reclaimed timber; Case D a staffing agency for refugees; Case E a bakery training young adults out of foster care; and Case F a solar installer serving low-income homeowners.

Data for each case include two interviews with the owner, eighteen months apart, and published impact reports. Board minutes were available for Cases A, C and F, which have boards; the other three are owner-managed without one. In all, the chapter draws on 12 owner interviews, 9 impact reports and 41 sets of board minutes. Excerpts are identified by case and source, for example A-I2 for the second interview in Case A, or C-BM for Case C's board minutes.

The study's sub-questions are: SQ1, how owners recognize a conflict between mission and margin; SQ2, how they resolve such conflicts; and SQ3, how their approach changes over the eighteen months.

F1: Owners Resolved Most Conflicts by Delaying

Claim: owners resolved most conflicts between mission and margin by delaying, deferring the costly option until a slow quarter had passed, rather than by choosing between mission and margin at the time.

Five of six owners described this pattern, in Cases A, B, C, D and F. Across the 12 interviews, owners described 37 distinct conflicts; 22 were resolved by delay. The owner of Case A explained a decision about paying a price premium to a cooperative: "We said we'd revisit it after the holiday season. By then the cash was there" (A-I1). In Case C, board minutes record a proposal to switch to a more expensive certified timber supplier tabled three times over seven months before being approved (C-BM). The owner of Case D described the same practice in different words: "You don't say no to the mission. You say not this month" (D-I2).

F2: Recognition Came From Customers and Staff More Than From Figures

Claim: owners most often recognized a conflict when a customer or employee raised it, not when financial reports showed it.

Of the 37 conflicts, 21 were first raised by a customer or employee and 9 by the owner's review of figures; owners could not recall the source of the remaining 7. In Case B, a client's request to stop using workers with records on a particular site was the trigger for one of the case's most serious conflicts (B-I1). In Case E, a trainee's complaint about shortened training hours during a busy month prompted the owner to recognize that the bakery's growth was cutting into its training mission (E-I1).

F3: Owners Formalized Mission Commitments After a Conflict, Not Before

Claim: after a significant conflict, owners wrote down a mission commitment they had previously kept informally.

This finding holds in four of six firms, Cases A, C, E and F. In each, the second interview or the board minutes record a written rule adopted within six months of a conflict the owner described as significant. Case F's board adopted a rule that at least 40 percent of installations each year would be for low-income households, after a year in which the share had fallen to a quarter (F-BM). Case E's owner wrote a minimum number of training hours per trainee into the bakery's staff handbook (E-I2). Cases B and D adopted no such rules over the period studied.

F4: The Approach Became More Explicit Over Eighteen Months

Claim: between the first and second interviews, owners described their handling of conflicts in more explicit terms, naming trade-offs they had previously described as one-off decisions.

Five of six owners did so. In the first round, owners typically described individual decisions; in the second, four of them named a general approach, such as "mission first in the long run, margin first in a bad quarter" (A-I2). One owner, in Case B, described her approach in the same terms in both interviews.

The Discrepant Case

Case E did not follow F1. Its owner consistently chose the mission option at the time a conflict arose and absorbed the losses. The bakery's impact reports show that in two of the three years covered, it ran at a loss that the owner covered from personal savings and a family loan (E-IR). In both interviews she described delay as unacceptable: "If a trainee is here now, the training is now. I can't defer a person" (E-I1). Of the six conflicts she described, none was resolved by delay. Case E also differs in structure: it is the smallest firm, with 11 employees, has no board and serves a mission defined by individuals in training at a given moment rather than by purchases or contracts that can be scheduled. These differences are reported here; the interpretation chapter considers what they might mean.

Summary of Findings

The chapter has reported what owners did and said, with counts and sources. It has not offered explanations for these patterns. Smith et al. (2013) and Ebrahim et al. (2014) discuss tensions between social and business goals and the risk that hybrids drift from their missions; chapter six compares the findings with that work and considers why the patterns took the form they did.

Table 1

Findings by Sub-Question and Case

Counts are drawn from the coded interview data and documents. The discrepant case is Case E for F1.

References

Battilana, J., & Lee, M. (2014). Advancing research on hybrid organizing: Insights from the study of social enterprises. Academy of Management Annals, 8(1), 397-441. https://doi.org/10.5465/19416520.2014.893615

Ebrahim, A., Battilana, J., & Mair, J. (2014). The governance of social enterprises: Mission drift and accountability challenges in hybrid organizations. Research in Organizational Behavior, 34, 81-100. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.riob.2014.09.001

Smith, W. K., Gonin, M., & Besharov, M. L. (2013). Managing social-business tensions: A review and research agenda for social enterprise. Business Ethics Quarterly, 23(3), 407-442. https://doi.org/10.5840/beq201323327