Social Artrepreneurship and Collectives: Lessons for Social Entrepreneurs from the Wanderers Art Movement in Imperial Russia

We draw on a hybrid organisation of artists in Imperial Russia to examine the experience of ‘social artrepreneurs’ – artists who pursued both social and commercial goals. Using contemporary theories of organisation, we argue that a key feature of this organisation – the collective of artists – helped in connecting means and ends while balancing hybridity through the process of partial organising. Our paper contributes to the burgeoning literature on how organisations deal with hybridity challenges by exploring the means-ends perspective at the level of an organisation. It highlights the use of partial organising for balancing social and commercial pursuits.