Social Enterprise Emergence from Social Movement Activism: The Fairphone Case

Abstract

Effectuation theory invests agency — intention and purposeful enactment — for a new venture creation in the entrepreneurial actor(s). Based on the results of a 15-month in-depth longitudinal case study of Amsterdam-based social enterprise Fairphone, we argue that effectual entrepreneurial agency is co-constituted by distributed agency, the proactive conferral of material resources and legitimacy to an eventual entrepreneur by heterogeneous actors external to a new venture. In the context of social movement activism, we show how an effectual network pre-committed resources to an inchoate social enterprise to produce a material artefact because it symbolised moral values of network members. We develop a model of social enterprise emergence based on these findings. We theorise the role of material artefacts in effectuation theory and suggest that, in the case, the artefact served as a boundary object, present in multiple social words and triggering commitment from actors not governed by hierarchical arrangements.

Keywords: Social entrepreneurship, effectuation, distributed agency, material artefacts, social movement, longitudinal case study