PhD Defence Valerija Golubic

The defence of Valerija Golubic’s PhD thesis called “Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Analysis of Social Enterprises’ Challenges to Success” is at 15:00 hours, with an on-site reception afterwards.

Note: The defence can also be followed online via a livestream

Summary
Social enterprises are organisations that aim to achieve social good through doing business. However, they face unique challenges compared to regular businesses, making their success more difficult to achieve. This PhD thesis explores some of those challenges.

First, the thesis investigated the common belief that focusing on profit comes at the expense of achieving social goals. Using a dataset of 820 social enterprises around the world, the thesis found that making money and achieving social goals can actually go hand in hand. Good financial performance of social enterprises is linked with increased social impact, especially when a social enterprise’s way of working includes the provision of extra support to its beneficiaries. Next, through in-depth case study, the thesis zoomed in on a Dutch sheltered workshop — a form of publicly owned social enterprise that provides workplaces for people with disabilities — affected by the new Participation Act. The conditions the new legislation imposed on the organisation made certain organisational stakeholders more important for the survival of the organisation, such as their business customers and the general public. This forced the organisation to adopt a stronger business logic and to pay more attention to demonstrating its social impact, making it a hybrid organisation with social, business, and public policy goals that all needed to be achieved. However, the organisation’s public policy goals, present at its inception, and the stakeholders representing those goals, still remained the most important, even as circumstances changed, creating additional and unique challenges for this type of organisation. These challenges were reflected in the "tensions of agency" – a conflict between how much freedom an organisation can have versus how much it needs in order to fulfil its role – making it difficult for the organisation to truly change in its attempts to thrive. The case study findings emphasised the need to consider and address the expectations of all organisational stakeholders at once, as these expectations often conflict and are interdependent, creating paradoxes that organisations must navigate. Success in navigating paradoxes depends, to a large extent, on the organisation’s ability and freedom to act, highlighting the importance of power and agency in stakeholder relations.

In conclusion, the thesis calls for transforming the contexts in which social enterprises operate to facilitate their seamless operation and enable them to achieve their potential for significant social impact, rather than merely seeking strategies to navigate their unique challenges.

About Valerija Golubic
Valerija started her PhD trajectory at Campus Fryslân, University of Groningen in 2019, under the supervision of Prof. dr. Gjalt de Jong and Dr. Emma Folmer. Her research deals with social enterprises, with a special focus on tensions and circumstances preventing such organisations to thrive. Valerija presented her work at eminent entrepreneurship conferences, such as Babson and RENT. She was a lecturer in the Sustainable Entrepreneurship master programme in the academic year 2023 -2024.