| Recent decades have seen an increase in the popularity of "social enterprise" ventures that actively pursue both social and financial goals. In this dissertation, I ask: To what extent can such organizations be simultaneously prosocial and profit-motivated? How (and how well) do these they maintain their prosocial commitments? Answering these questions advances the scholarship on social enterprise and also speaks to themes in organizational, economic, and political sociology.;Data come from an investigation of two industries---fair trade and socially responsible investing. I conducted 66 interviews with US-based fair trade practitioners and investing professionals from 48 businesses, which were supplemented with observations and informal interviews collected at industry conferences.;I draw two main conclusions about social enterprise: First, while it might seem like a problematic proposition, practitioners often speak about social enterprise in unproblematic ways. I argue that this is so because a discourse has evolved that resolves the contradictions inherent to social enterprise and justifies a wide range of actions. Second, I argue that there are two primary "bulwarks" to market forces that compel organizations to give due attention to their social missions. These bulwarks come in the form of formal and what I term affective controls. I suggest that the difference in the extent to which organizations in these industries rely on affective controls has had a role in shaping how they have developed over the past decades. Theoretically this research advances organizational sociology by moving beyond debates about whether institutional logics can be competing or companionable to show how the answer depends on where one looks. In the fair trade and socially responsible investing industries, institutional logics that conflicted at the level of organizational practice were made compatible in discourse. The dissertation also improves the scholarship in economic and political sociology through its attention to market-based socializing projects---that is, efforts to (re)embed economic action in social relationships and to decommodify social actors. It not only highlights the contradictions that may undermine them but also suggests how they can be successful. |
