Call for Papers

Crises such as global warming and the COVID-19 pandemic have brought to our attention the fragility of our social and economic systems. They have also made us acutely aware that many fundamental aspects of our lives are inevitably anchored in the communities in which we live. Indeed, organizational researchers have emphasized the importance of communities’ capability to adjust and maintain their functioning prior, during, and following a crisis (Sutcliffe & Vogus, 2003; Williams et al., 2017). Although some organizational scholars posit that such a capability rests on a community’s ability to form diverse social solutions such as nonprofits and cooperatives (Farny et al., 2019; Rao & Greve, 2018), communities’ entrepreneurial responses to crises extend well beyond these organizational forms. Furthermore, community-rooted entrepreneurship and social innovation plays an equally important role outside of crisis, for example, as a powerful tool for positive societal change (Dentoni et al., 2018; Haugh, 2005; Logue & Grimes, 2022), social opportunity development (Shepherd et al., 2020), and institutionalizing locally-led relational solutions (Logue, 2019).
 
Too much scholarly interest, however, has assumed that these societal impact organizations are siloed and, as such, act separately to achieve positive societal change. Yet in fact, effectively addressing complex societal problems involves interdependent stakeholder coalitions (Bridoux & Stoelhorst, 2022; Gray & Purdy, 2018; Powell et al., 2018) spanning entire communities (Daskalaki et al., 2015; Murphy et al., 2020; Peredo & Chrisman, 2006) to achieve desired ends. To account for this breadth and diversity, the concept of civic wealth creation (CWC), coined by Lumpkin and Bacq (2019), has attracted increasing scholarly interest as a valuable lens to study cross-disciplinary actor collaboration and innovation (Brenton & Slawinski, 2023; Chalmers, 2021; Fortunato & Alter, 2015; Fröcklin et al., 2018).
 
Civic wealth refers to a community’s economic, social, and communal assets and endowments (Lumpkin & Bacq, 2019). It is a broad indicator of the intellectual, affective, and material resources, capacities, and capabilities in settings ranging from neighborhoods and villages to cities and regions. CWC is a creative new way of thinking about what occurs when diverse stakeholders and regular citizens collaborate, participate, negotiate and coalesce around actions to improve their well-being and vitality through cooperation, kinship, and commerce. Because CWC is broadly construed and encompasses multiple actors – local leaders, community residents, entrepreneurs, funders, supporters, companies, government agencies, and others – it lends itself to analyses across multiple organizational dimensions.
 
The conceptualization of CWC is consistent with extensive theoretical and empirical evidence showing that communities often resolve problems related to the use, protection, and distribution of common goods, through the emergence of local governance systems (Ostrom, 1990, 2010). CWC bolsters Ostrom’s findings that complex challenges require engaging multiple stakeholders in intentional collective efforts and building problem-solving coalitions (Purdy, 2012) that rely on collaboration, entrepreneurial thinking, and an understanding of local systems and institutional infrastructure (Hinings et al., 2017). Stakeholder coalitions – involving communities, entrepreneurs and supporters as the three main categories of actors – that are inclusive and participatory are consistently able to generate more impactful and lasting solutions than solo actors offering top-down approaches to societies challenges (e.g., Bryson et al., 2017; Ziegler et al., 2023). As a result, “[b]y encouraging diverse stakeholders to coalesce around community-building initiatives and empowering citizens to engage locally and personally in ensuring their well-being” (Lumpkin et al., 2023: 10), CWC has proven to be a potent creative strategy for catalyzing change.
 
How, then, might we expand our understanding of how organizations act as agents of positive societal change in collaboration with others, and how they organize and coordinate around a shared purpose to achieve the intended effects on society? Achieving effective partnership involves some degree of power-sharing as well as alignment of partners regarding the purposes of the partnership, yet these may not be easy to achieve (Gray et al., 2022). Adopting CWC as a lens, we seek research that draws on new knowledge in the areas of co-creation, collaboration, and engaged participation by diverse multi-stakeholder coalitions to enhance understanding of the processes involved in lasting positive societal change.
 
In this sub-theme, we are interested in examining both (1) the sources of CWC, and how actors from across sectors organize and govern collectively to build multi-stakeholder coalitions, and (2) the processes that underlie collaboration among CWC actors and enable it to be sustained. The following are examples of topics for submission that this sub-theme might explore:
 
CWC and impact co-creation motives:

• How do collections of people sharing common conditions and experiences raise support for their cause and attract entrepreneurs’ attention to create civic wealth?

• How to involve companies in CWC beyond the business case – and rather because it is the ‘right thing to do’?

• How can companies innovate, invest, and create civic wealth by partnering with entrepreneurs or fostering an entrepreneurial mindset within their organization?

• What factors influence supporters’ decision to participate in, invest, ignore, or leave the CWC process? What local systems or institutional knowledge is needed or assumed?

• Which of the three key actors – community, entrepreneur, regimes of support – are best positioned to start a CWC initiative, and under which conditions?

 
CWC and impact co-creation processes:

• How do CWC stakeholders allocate resources towards long-term commitments?

• How does CWC augment our understanding of co-creation?

• What types of intermediary work and intermediary organizations enable CWC?

• How does the concept of CWC help bridge market and non-market strategies?

• How do CWC stakeholder collaborations build on but also extend scholarship on CSPs (cross-sector partnerships) and what best practices from each sector to leverage in CWC?

• What binds CWC actors together and how do those bonds affect CWC processes?

• What is the role of institutional infrastructure in enabling and supporting CWC processes?

• How do community or entrepreneurial ecosystems foster or deter the development of CWC?

 
CWC and impact co-creation outcomes and measurement:

• What are the different manifestations of civic wealth as an outcome?

• Under what conditions is CWC most effective for enhancing the intellectual, affective and material resources, capacities, and capabilities of a civic setting?

• How to account for the learnings of past experimentation, both successful and less successful CWC initiatives, to improve CWC outcomes?

• What are the most effective ways to evaluate and measure manifestations of civic wealth?

• How does measuring civic wealth enrich our understanding of impact measurement?

• What is the relationship between CWC and the State? How does this vary across local settings and to what effect?

 
Finally, in terms of methodology, we welcome theoretical and empirical contributions that adopt diverse disciplinary lenses to enrich this growing field of inquiry, including studies that draw on organizational theory, organizational behavior, strategy, entrepreneurship, sociology, public administration, nonprofit management, urban planning and more. We are interested in research that uses both quantitative and qualitative approaches, and encourage the submission of papers that use new methods and novel data.
 

References

• Brenton, J., & Slawinski, N. (2023): Collaborating for community regeneration: Facilitating partnerships in, through, and for place. Journal of Business Ethics, 184(4), 815–834.

• Bridoux, F., & Stoelhorst, J.W. (2022): Stakeholder governance: Solving the collective action problems in joint value creation. Academy of Management Review, 47(2), 214–236.
• Bryson, J., Sancino, A., Benington, J., & Sørensen, E. (2017): Towards a multi-actor theory of public value co-creation. Public Management Review, 19(5), 640–654.
• Chalmers, D. (2021): Social entrepreneurship’s solutionism problem. Journal of Management Studies, 58(5), 1363–1370.
• Daskalaki, M., Hjorth, D., & Mair, J. (2015): Are entrepreneurship, communities, and social transformation related? Journal of Management Inquiry, 24, 419–423.
• Dentoni, D., Pascucci, S., Poldner, K., & Gartner, W.B. (2018): Learning “who we are” by doing: Processes of co-constructing prosocial identities in community-based enterprises. Journal of Business Venturing, 33, 603–622.
• Farny, S., Kibler, E., & Down, S. (2019): Collective emotions in institutional creation work. Academy of Management Journal, 62, 765–799.
• Fortunato, M.W.P., & Alter, T. (2015): Community entrepreneurship development: An introduction. Community Development, 46, 444–455.
• Fröcklin, S., Jiddawi, N.S., & de la Torre-Castro, M. (2018): Small-scale innovations in coastal communities. Ecology and Society, 23(2), 34–42.
• Gray, B., & Purdy, J. (2018): Collaborating for our future: Multistakeholder partnerships for solving complex problems. Oxford University Press.
• Gray, B., Purdy, J. & Ansari, S. (2022): Confronting power asymmetries in partnerships to address grand challenges. Organization Theory, 3(2), 1–25.
• Haugh, H. (2007): Community-led social venture creation. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 31, 161–182.
• Hinings, C. R., Logue, D., & Zietsma, C. (2017): Fields, institutional infrastructure and governance. The Sage handbook of organizational institutionalism, 163–189.
• Logue, D. (2019): Theories of social innovation. Edward Elgar Publishing.
• Logue, D., & Grimes, M. (2022): Platforms for the people: Enabling civic crowdfunding through the cultivation of institutional infrastructure. Strategic Management Journal, 43(3), 663–693.
• Lumpkin, G.T., & Bacq, S. (2019): Civic wealth creation: A new view of stakeholder engagement and societal impact. Academy of Management Perspectives, 33, 383–404.
• Lumpkin, G. T., Meléndez, E., & Bacq, S. (2023): Civic wealth creation: Bypassing monopolies through collective action. Academy of Management Perspectives, In-press.
• Murphy, M., Danis, W. M., & Mack, J. (2020): From principles to action: Community-based entrepreneurship in the Toquaht Nation. Journal of Business Venturing, 35(6), 106051.
• Ostrom, E. (1990): Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
• Ostrom, E. (2010): Beyond markets and states: Polycentric governance of complex economic systems. American Economic Review, 100, 641–672.
• Peredo, A.M., & Chrisman, J.J. (2006): Toward a theory of community-based enterprise. Academy of Management Review, 31, 309–328.
• Powell, E. E., Hamann, R., Bitzer, V., & Baker, T. (2018): Bringing the elephant into the room? Enacting conflict in collective prosocial organizing. Journal of Business Venturing, 33(5), 623–642.
• Purdy, J. M. (2012): A framework for assessing power in collaborative governance processes. Public Administration Review, 72(3), 409–417.
• Rao, H., & Greve, H.R. (2018): Disasters and community resilience: Spanish flu and the formation of retail cooperatives in Norway. Academy of Management Journal, 61, 5–25.
• Shepherd, D.A., Sattari, R., & Patzelt, H. (2020): A social model of opportunity development: Building and engaging communities of inquiry. Journal of Business Venturing, 106033.
• Sutcliffe, K.M., & Vogus, T.J. (2003): Organizing for resilience. In K.S. Cameron, J.E. Dutton, & R.E. Quinn (Eds.), Positive organizational scholarship: Foundations of a new discipline (pp. 94–110): San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler.
• Williams, T.A., Gruber, D.A., Sutcliffe, K.M., Shepherd, D.A., & Zhao, E.Y. (2017): Organizational response to adversity: Fusing crisis management and resilience research streams. Academy of Management Annals, 11, 733–769.
• Ziegler, R., Bauwens, T., Roy, M. J., Teasdale, S., Fourrier, A., & Raufflet, E. (2023): Embedding circularity: Theorizing the social economy, its potential, and its challenges. Ecological Economics, 214, 107970.
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