Research On The Legitimacy Construction Path Of Social Enterprises In China

Social enterprise,emerging in western countries,is a kind of hybrid organization that use economic means to solve social problems.It can combine public welfare goals with business ideas and solve social problems creatively.In 2004,the concept of social enterprise was introduced to China as an innovative public service model.Since it highly satisfied Chinese governance transformation needs,social enterprise became an important part of the social governance system in no time.However,up to now social enterprise is still a typical imported product in China,revelant sociological theoretical researches mainly focus on concept discrimination and theoretical transplantation.With the use of management ideology and interdisciplinary perspective,some more specifications and diverse research methods are applied,thus a group of relatively high-leveled research results appeared in this area.But these studies pay more attention to management issues such as social entrepreneurship,organizational growth,etc,and ignore the main perspective of sociological research such as the interaction of the social system and the organizations.At present,Chinese social enterprise doesn’t have an independent legal identity and there is no particular regulatory system.The social recognition is generally low as well.Compared with European and American countries,it is difficult for Chinese social enterprises to obtain the support of government resources and broad recognition from the society.However,this has not hindered the practice and exploration of local social enterprises.At present,social enterprises have played an important role in many social service fields and formed certain interaction with the institutional environment.This paper uses case study method to explain the evolution process of social enterprises and mainly investigates the following two aspects: First,in the case of insufficient macro-institutional support,how can social enterprises break through the resource dilemma and sucessfully survive in the early stage of establishment? Second,in the long-term development process,why do social enterprises undergo the transformation of development path?This paper takes Guangdong WT Workshop as the target example to elaborate and analyze the above issues in detail.In the initial stage,as a new thing,the legal legitimacy,administrative legitimacy and social legitimacy of social enterprises are obviously insufficient.The organization can only take the business development as the orientation and obtain the necessary social recognition within the local relationship network to survive.It is difficult for organizations to gain recognition directly through routine operations when stakeholders are confused about what a social enterprise is.To this end,the organization spared no expense in time,energy and economic cost to establish emotional links with stakeholders,provide additional services and quickly won the "favourable impression" of farmers,consumers and organization members through a series of unconventional activities such as door-to-door visits to farmers,cooking for kindergartens,opening reading clubs and so on.Thus,with the help of a flexible and practical way of action,WT workshop was able to put its function and effectiveness into full use and won the recognition of its behavior from the market,the society and the internal organization.In this condition,WT workshop tried to introduce the organizational vision of "activating public welfare through business methods" in order to gain the comprehensive organizational recognition.At this stage,WT Workshop acquired the organizational legitimacy that supported its early development through the accumulation of organizational behavior legitimacy.However,with the expansion of the organization scale and the amount of stakeholders,higher demands for the specialization and standardization of its dual functions are generated.At the same time,after 2015,social enterprises’ model are popularized nationwide to a certain extent,and people have begun to have a deeper understanding of this emerging organizaion form.Facing the macro system of environmental impact and the binding of small-scale network,the flexible and fragmented way of action have been unsustainable,in order to achieve sustainable development,WT Workshop must improve its function and structure while reinforce the identity feature to explore the normal development model,which is more stable and more long-term effective.As a result,it finally formed the new development pattern of "WT workshop + WT agricultural sustainable development center + QX farm",which leads to effective institutional arrangement for a wider range of internal and external identity.At this period,the legitimacy of organizational characteristics replaced the legitimacy of organizational behavior and became the main source of maintaining organizational legitimacy.At the same time,WT workshop also realized the transition from barbaric growth to standardized development.In general,although WT Workshop is just one particular case,it is a typical self-sufficient social enterprise in China.From its early establishment to its form change,it shows distinct institutional characteristics,and the legitimacy mechanism always plays an important role.The construction path of organizational legitimacy can be summarized as bottom-up "from accumulation in fact to confirmation in form",which is also the process from generation to maintenance of organizational legitimacy.Based on the theoretical analysis of the case study of WT Workshop and the corresponding system discussion,this paper draws the following conclusions.First,the legitimacy of organizational behavior and organizational characteristics are two effective ways to construct the legitimacy of social enterprises.Organizational behavior legitimacy,which is recognition of specific organizational behaviors,is based on unconventional and significant effect of organization performance,highlighting the effective function.Building the legitimacy of organizational behavior can help the organization breakthrough institutional obstruction rapidly and survive in the business competition.But the cost can be relatively high so that it cannot be a long-term solution and usually plays an important role in the early-stage and revolution period.The legitimacy of organizational characteristics is the recognition of the institutional arrangements in the normalized development of the organization,highlighting formalization,standardization and characterization.It is featured as the strengthening of the organizational function and structure and the strengthening of its identity characteristics.It can help the organization form more distinct and more transmissible legitimacy elements so as to improve the marginal effect of legitimacy construction and gain broader social recognition,which promotes social enterprises to become more competitive market players.The legitimacy of organizational characteristics usually plays a significant role in the stable development of the organization.The two are like one body and two sides,both closely related,but also have significant differences.The former is the accumulation of quantitative changes,and the latter is proof of qualitative changes.They will always accompany the growth of the organization,but the focus will change at different stages of the organization’s development.Social enterprises can adopt a "step-by-step" legitimacy construction strategy based on the comprehensive consideration of the characteristics of their own development stages and the system scenarios they are facing,and have their own emphasis and choice on the acquisition of legitimacy at different development stages,thereby gradually accumulating organizational legitimacy..Second,the case study expands Lin Shangli and Cai He’s connotation of validity in the process of accumulating legitimacy through validity.The validity of the organization not only means that it needs to be effective,but also reflects the dynamic evolution process from effective to efficient,which makes the bottom-up legitimacy construction path implies the efficiency-oriented principle.In other words,social enterprises can build organizational legitimacy in the bottom-up way through strategic actions,and break through the "resource trap" of newly created organizations through the legitimacy logic.Social enterprises can effectively solve the concerns of stakeholder groups and demonstrate the effectiveness of their own functions and the superiority of their organizational form,thereby gradually improving social cognition and strengthening internal and external recognition.At the same time,under the core of maintaining dual mission,it creatively localizes its organizational structure and mode of action to improve its coordination and fit with existing institutional framework,thereby gaining legitimacy.With the success of the establishment of organizational legitimacy,the internal and external institutional environment will show clearer expectations for the development of the organization,so that the institutional environment can shape the standardized development of social enterprises through the legitimacy mechanism.And this shaping process is not only from the outside to the inside as we thought,but also generates from the internal needs of the organization’s survival and development.This actually reflects the parallelism of the legitimacy mechanism and the efficiency mechanism.In summary,the localization development of Chinese social enterprises is bound to be a collaborative development process between the organization and the institutional environment.While the institutional environment shapes the organization,the organizational actions will also profoundly affect the construction of the institution.From the case study,we find that organizations face rapid changes in terms of internal and external development constraints during development,resulting in a transformation of development paths.China is experiencing social transformation,which means the policy system,economic environment,and social and cultural concepts are all changing.As a system innovation model,social enterprises have effectively improved the efficiency of social governance and conformed to the trend of institutional changes.For this reason,we need to create more favorable institutional support for the development of Chinese social enterprises from a broader perspective and shape the standardized development of Chinese social enterprises with a more favorable institutional environment.In this way,we can also promote the balanced development of the market and society.