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Activist Social Entrepreneurship: a Case Study of the Green Campus Co-Operative

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Activist Social Entrepreneurship: a Case Study of the Green Campus Co-Operative Activist Social Entrepreneurship: A Case Study of the Green Campus Co-operative By: Madison Hopper Supervised By: Rod MacRae A Major Paper submitted to the Faculty of Environmental Studies In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master in Environmental Studies York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 31 July 2018 1 Table of Contents ABSTRACT .......................................................................................................................................................... 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................................................................. 4 FOREWORD........................................................................................................................................................ 7 INTRODUCTION: WHO’S TO BLAME?.......................................................................................................... 9 CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW ........................................................................................................... 12 SOCIAL ENTERPRISES ............................................................................................................................................... 12 Hybrid Business Models ..................................................................................................................................... 13 Mission Quality - TOMS shoes ........................................................................................................................... 15 Mergers, Acquisitions and Combating Mission Drift ......................................................................................... 16 FAIR TRADE ............................................................................................................................................................. 18 CHAPTER 2: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS ........................................................................................... 21 INSTITUTIONAL THEORY AND INSTITUTIONAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP ........................................................................ 21 Institutional Theory ............................................................................................................................................. 22 Organization Fields ............................................................................................................................................ 23 SOCIAL CAPITAL THEORY ........................................................................................................................................ 24 COGNITIVE FRAMES IN CSR THEORY ...................................................................................................................... 26 CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY ..................................................................................................................... 29 STUDY RATIONALE .................................................................................................................................................. 29 SELECTION OF SITE .................................................................................................................................................. 30 DATA COLLECTION .................................................................................................................................................. 30 DATA ORGANIZATION AND ANALYSIS ..................................................................................................................... 32 Limitations to Data Collection ............................................................................................................................ 33 CHAPTER 4: THE GREEN CAMPUS CO-OPERATIVE, A CASE STUDY ................................................. 33 What is Green Campus Cotton Trying to Address: The Current Situation in the Indian Garment Industry ...... 34 Sumangali Schemes ............................................................................................................................................. 35 An Alternative Approach: Activist Social Enterprise .......................................................................................... 36 The GCC within Fairtrade .................................................................................................................................. 37 The GCC as an Incubator ................................................................................................................................... 44 The GCC as a Co-op ........................................................................................................................................... 46 CHAPTER 5: DISCUSSION.............................................................................................................................. 48 A Normative Analysis: Green Campus Cooperative and Institutional Theory ................................................... 48 Normative Analysis: Green Campus Co-operative and Cognitive Frames Theory ............................................ 51 A Normative Analysis: Green Campus Co-operative and Social Capital ........................................................... 52 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................................................... 54 APPENDIX ......................................................................................................................................................... 56 APPENDIX A: INTERVIEW GUIDE ................................................................................................................................ 56 APPENDIX B: PRICE DISCOUNT CALCULATOR ............................................................................................................ 58 BIBLIOGRAPHY .............................................................................................................................................. 59 2 Abstract The globalization of the garment industry has encouraged transnational companies to further externalize their cost of production on workers and the environment around the world. Producing countries are engaging in what many scholars refer to as a “race to the bottom” regarding global wages and labor standards as these countries compete to attract foreign investment. There have been many attempts to push back against the egregious effects of this process through anti- sweatshop campaigns, laws, codes of conduct, union activism, and most recently, social enterprise. While these actors have traction in some ways we have yet to see significant changes in the behaviour of transnational corporations. This action- research case study introduces the concept of the activist social enterprise that not only engages in commercial activity but also advances a social and/or environmental mission through institutional entrepreneurship practices, in this specific case fair trade. Using institutional entrepreneurship theory, social capital theory and cognitive frames theory this case study attempts to create a normative framework to understand how social enterprises can begin to pave the way for systemic change in the garment industry by: 1. Fighting to capture and influence institutional norms and regulations of business behaviour. 2. Training managers to embrace the navigation of trade-offs between economic, social and environmental progress. 3. Leverage social capital to develop a radical mainstreaming distribution strategy when competing with traditional corporations. 3 Acknowledgements When a rock climber begins an assent, they will probably link their harness to pitons bored along the face of the mountain. These pitons were not created naturally, but rather some brave climber before them had volunteered to absorb all the risk of climbing without supports. These individuals are often seen as eccentric, brave or even crazy to take on risk with such a blatant disregard for their own safety. The business world is no different. New ideas in the business world that challenge the status quo of profit maximization, shareholder primacy and introduce wealth or surplus re-distribution methods are often also seen in contemporary business discourse as eccentric, naively brave, but most often crazy. Managers are usually not willing to “stick their neck out” for an idea that has not been tried and tested or cannot by analyzed through a traditional business case framework. This does not mean that those individuals are not brave, incapable of creative thinking or don’t care about the consequences of status quo thinking. Rather, as organizational theory would suggest, they are bound to the institutional rules that surround them and these rules breed cognitive frames of thinking and perceiving problems that are innately irrational. The very concept that you are expected to be one type of person in your business life and another in your personal life eloquently demonstrates this confused set of norms that lead to a sea of irrational thinking and decision-making in business. This major research project is dedicated to those crazy, brave, piton-boring individuals and the paths up insurmountable mountains that they have begun to try and carve out for the rest of the world to follow. I would like to acknowledge a few of them before you dive into this major paper. The first is Jennie Coleman and her entire team at the Equifruit banana company. There are few
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