Scaling the Societal Impact of Community Enterprises for Sustainability

Introduction

How can community enterprises scale their impact and reshape society beyond markets and states? This is an important and timely challenge in realizing societal transformations for sustainability, as scholars and policymakers have recently placed high expectations on the transformative potential of communities. While community enterprises are widely known to foster collective action locally, the mechanisms through which they can achieve wider transformations to tackle urgent sustainability challenges such as climate change are poorly understood.

Objectives of SCENSUS

SCENSUS aims to identify and understand the mechanisms by which community enterprises can scale their societal impacts. It will analyse initiatives in three key fields (energy, carsharing, repair) in Germany, France, the UK, and the Netherlands, to:

1. Develop a unified theory that explains the factors behind the scaling of community enterprises.
2. Analyse the institutional complexity arising as community enterprises scale and the collective mechanisms to manage them.
3. Identify and analyse community enterprises’ strategies to mobilise critical resources and build legitimacy for scaling.
4. Understand the roles of social networks in community enterprises’ scaling dynamics.

Research Contributions

This research will:

1. Advance collective action theory with key insights from social network theory and organisational institutionalism.
2. Create a novel approach to scaling, beyond business growth in single organisations and market diffusion.
3. Connect different levels of analysis, from community enterprises’ internal functioning to their aggregate development.
4. Develop and test an innovative multi-method research design combining large-N statistical analysis, surveys, and comparative case studies, to capture dynamic scaling processes.

Conclusion

By creating a new interdisciplinary theory of the dynamics of community enterprises within wider social systems, SCENSUS will advance the research frontier on collective action and organisation studies.