Scaling Enterprises: A Critique and Opportunity

Scalability in social enterprise, defined as the ability to expand and adapt its reach to better address the magnitude of a social need or problem more effectively, with the aim of maximizing social impact, still represents a controversial issue. With the aim to advance our current understanding of scalability in social entrepreneurship, we theorize on an embedded view of scaling social impact where decisions about how to scale depend on the extent to which a social enterprise is both context and resource embedded. We show that while context embeddedness is of crucial importance in determining which strategy is chosen, resource characteristics provides the organization greater discretion to experiment and capitalize on emergent growth opportunities.