Kerstin Neumann

University of Innsbruck

The role of social-purpose entrepreneurship in sustaining collective action for societal problems

How can collective action for complex societal problems be initiated and sustained when markets and institutions fail to do so? Societal problems such as climate change and global health persist despite substantial technological capacity and organizational and institutional engagement. In her talk, Kerstin submits that these enduring failures reflect behavioral and organizational breakdowns in collective action rather than merely economic externalities. Integrating behavioral, institutional, and design-science perspectives, she theorizes how, in the face of complex societal problems, collective-action capacity is built cognitively, motivationally, and organizationally when conventional governance and market mechanisms fail. She starts from the premise that a precise problem formulation is key in advancing effective problem solving and develops a process framework centered around social-purpose entrepreneurship, in which actors restore coordination through four interrelated mechanisms: (1) structured problem formulation (defining an ill-structured societal condition as a tractable problem), (2) problem decomposition (portioning it into subproblems that offer valuable opportunities for relevant and available actors), (3) coalitional orchestration (aligning heterogeneous awareness, motivations, and capabilities across diverse actors and institutional logics), and (4) reflexive design adaptation (sustaining societal purpose against market recapture). Our framework contributes to theories of collective action, the literature on grand challenges, and institutional work by developing a theory of social-purpose entrepreneurship as a mechanism for initiating and effectively sustaining collective action to address societal problems, which are often shaped by market and institutional failures.