Organizational Stigma and Resource Mobilization Challenges in a Social Enterprise: Arguing for a Grounded Research

Social enterprises (SEs) blend social goals with for-profit motive and such a blending provides unique opportunity and challenges for the enterprise. Owing to their primary goal of solving social problems, SEs emerge in areas where government fails to solve issues and private sector does not find them to be profitable to pursue. Such a context poses unique challenges for social enterprise in terms of availability of resource because their predominant social focus fail to tap in to traditional sources for resources unlike their private counterparts. This creates challenges for resource management of SEs. SEs, which otherwise fulfill their social mission, but due to nature of their business are ‘core-stigmatized’ further discourage external resource holders to associate and share resources with such SE creating additional resource challenges because of the stigma attached to the business. Hence, it is interesting to understand how such ‘core stigmatized’ SEs manage their resources. With limited research in this area, studies may need to understand this through in- depth investigation of one or more revelatory cases of a SE that is stigmatized because of the nature of its core product like tobacco, men’s’ bath-house. Following established process of inductive theory building such studies may develop grounded resource management framework. Such studies have important implications for literature on social entrepreneurship particularly of the stigmatized type as also contribute to designing grounded research in such emerging areas.