Innovation sociale et diversité organisationnelle : le cas du commerce équitable

A common view in the literature on social entrepreneurship and social enterprise is to highlight the fact that social innovation crosses the organizational forms. But does that social innovation should be considered regardless of the organizational form? Fair Trade (FT) offers a quite interesting example of both a social innovation and a field in which diverse organizational forms coexist. My research questions are twofold: (1) what are the different types of organizational forms that underlie social innovation in the FT sector?; (2) do these different forms bring different types of social innovation?
The methodology consists of interviews with the leaders of 57 Fair Trade Social Enterprises (FTSEs) in four European regions: Belgium, France (Rhône-Alpes), United Kingdom (England) and Italy (Rome). The findings show that the legal forms and governance models–the two elements of the organizational form considered here–can be combined into five categories of organizational forms: individual, manager-owned business, volunteer-based, multi-stakeholder cooperative and group. These categories seem to be linked, at least to a certain extent, to the age of the FTSE and to its goals. Certain forms seem to signal a particular type of social innovation. Volunteer-based FTSEs use education and advocacy as the main channel to pursue social change at the global level, and see the partnerships with the producers in the South as a vehicle to support the former goal. Individual and business-form FTSEs focus on offering benefits to the producers through a profitable commercial activity. And multi-stakeholder cooperatives and groups generally seek to combine both types of social innovation. However, nuances exist and lead to considering the organisational form as vehicles that may serve various purposes according to the context and the entrepreneurs’ profiles.
I suggest three theoretical frameworks to interpret the diversity of organizational forms and its link with the logics of social innovation. Neo-institutional economics allow to see organizational diversity as the result of the production of different types of goods within the “FT bundle”. New institutionalism in organizational analysis emphasizes organizational diversity as the result of either weak (or non-existent) or multiple institutional logics. And institutional entrepreneurship highlights the ability of FTSEs to shape the environment in a way that legitimizes their own way of conceiving social innovation. I conclude that these three frameworks offer complementary explanations to organizational diversity and that the latter is an asset rather than an obstacle for carrying social innovation in multiple and complementary ways.