Walking the Tightrope - An exploratory study of how Stockholm-based social enterprises manage the dilemma of embeddedness and disembeddedness

Abstract: Social entrepreneurship is a rising field of research and, in practice, a concept that bridges the public and private sector to offer solutions to social crises. With this thesis, we aim to contribute to the emerging body of literature by applying the concept of embeddedness to social entrepreneurship and investigating the dilemma of embeddedness and disembeddedness. Using a qualitative research design to collect and analyze data from Stockholm-based social entrepreneurs and industry experts, we identify patterns in their embeddedness process. We find this process to consist of three stages, characterized by a balancing act between embeddedness and disembeddedness and actively managed by the social entrepreneurs through semi-defined networking strategies. Through our findings, we shed light on the character of the dilemma between embeddedness and disembeddedness and show how social enterprises manage the balancing act, thereby suggesting a process view to embeddedness theory. In addition to these theoretical contributions, we hope to raise awareness among practitioners for a conscious management of embeddedness, allowing social enterprises to more efficiently make use of its positive effects.