Social Enterprises as Chameleons: The Rise of Social Enterprises as Innovative Solutions to Complex Challenges in Italy

We draw from historical institutionalism to investigate how historical contingencies shape the influence of multiple institutional logics on the emergence and institutionalization of a social innovation situated at the intersection of different institutional domains. Relying on a vast database of more than 500 archival sources, we show that the social enterprise organizational form emerged in Italy in the early 1980s as an innovative response to societal problems left unaddressed by the State. Initially, the social enterprise organizational form was mainly influenced by the cooperative logic. Over time, elements borrowed from the social welfare and commercial logics complemented the cooperative logic, resulting in greater heterogeneity in terms of characteristics of the social enterprises organizational model. This heterogeneity reflected the growing complexity and interplay of pressures from the cooperative, welfare, and market domains. Building on this evidence, we advance a multilevel, historically grounded understanding of the complex interplay between social innovations and the institutional orders in which they are embedded. In this way, we contribute to research on social innovations, historical institutionalism, and social enterprises.