“Rekindling purpose and passion: how the re-keying of a hybrid identity fosters and sustains social enterprise emergence”
Establishing and sustaining a dual, or hybrid, organizational identity is a persistent challenge for many social entrepreneurs. How do social entrepreneurs successfully combine seemingly incompatible missions and organizational identity attributes into a coherent hybrid identity that allows them to grow and sustain the social enterprise over time? Based on an in-depth, multi-method and longitudinal study of Fairphone, a social enterprise focused on producing and marketing an environmentally and socially “fair” smart-phone, we detail the identity- related struggles that the founders and employees of the enterprise went through as a result of internal operational challenges and changing evaluations of the enterprise by their stakeholders and in the media. Our findings indicate the active identity work that is done by the original group of founders who challenge the positive affirmation by third parties of singular identities, and instead re-key available identity attributes into a novel hybrid identity that accommodates seemingly contradictory and interdependent relationships between their social and commercial missions. By unpacking such re-keying processes, we provide new insight into the emergence of hybrid organizational identities and elaborate the importance of identity work in transitioning an emerging social enterprise into a sustainable venture.