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theses

Social issues often trigger both local and diffuse prosocial organizing efforts, including local prosocial venturing and broader social movements. Yet, despite the frequent co-occurrence of these two forms of prosocial organizing—organizing aimed at benefiting others by relieving their hardship and/or promoting their welfare—and their potential similarities and synergies, their research streams have developed independently. Prior studies of prosocial venturing are often decontextualized, owing to an ongoing focus on individual and hyper-local explanations of prosocial venturing that neglect the broader environment, while social movement scholars often neglect studying small, grassroots organizations in favor of larger, more prominent social movement organizations. As a result, little is known about how social movements might influence local prosocial venturing. At the same time, social issues also trigger a variety of local responses, as prosocial entrepreneurs often vary widely in the ways they define social issues and the strategies they employ to address them—yet existing theory on prosocial venturing gives little insight into what drives these differential enactments of social issues. A small but growing number of studies at the intersection of prosocial venturing and social movements suggests linking these two research streams may hold the key to understanding systematic variation between prosocial ventures, yet these studies leave unanswered critical questions about the theoretical mechanisms through which movements may influence ventures. In this study, I conduct a longitudinal inductive field study of the founders of 11 campus food pantries that operate in parallel with social movements around student hunger and basic needs on campus, in order to understand how and why social movements shape the way prosocial entrepreneurs enact social issues. My central finding and answer to this question is that variation in founders’ identification with social movements shapes whether or not they enact a social issue as stigmatized, which in turn shapes their strategies for responding to the issue. These findings hold important implications for research on prosocial venturing and social movements, for the relationship between the two, and for research on organizational stigma, while also suggesting a number of promising directions for future research.

ETD_11131

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

ETD doctoral

doi:10.7282/t3-4e3x-9s21

The author owns the copyright to this work.