The Interplay of Market Choices and Social Mission: Learning From B2B Social Enterprises in Emerging Economies
研究新兴经济体中B2B社会企业如何根据客户类型（国内或国际）选择不同的社会使命组织模式（整合或分离），并发现创始人的专业背景是关键因素。
Social enterprises that operate in business-to-business contexts, often out of emerging economies, typically face high expectations from business clients, mainstream competition, and the challenge of operating across distances. In these contexts, social enterprises need to carefully choose which market segments to serve and how to organize their social mission accordingly. Based on the case of impact sourcing—hiring and training of disadvantaged staff for global business services—we seek to better understand this interplay. In general, we find that social enterprises in this context focus on serving either domestic clients with an implicit social mission and an integrated social enterprise model or international clients with a more explicit social mission and a decoupled model. We discuss why both main configurations represent viable social enterprise models in the outsourcing industry, and why, in particular, the professional background of founders plays a key role in these strategic choices. Our findings contribute to a more nuanced and context-sensitive understanding of social enterprise model adoption in emerging economies.