Veranstaltungsprogramm der VHB Jahrestagung

Meaningful work and meaningfulness at work have been a subject of attention in a wide range of disciplines. Research has explored that designing workplaces or implementing programs which contribute to society can fuel a sense of meaning at work. A specific arrangement that aims to provide employees with meaning is corporate volunteering. Scholars on meaningfulness at work has approached the topic mostly from the employee’s perspective. In this article, we are exploring the organizational perspective of the challenges of providing ‘meaningful’ corporate volunteering. To understand how organizations manage tensions inherent to meaningful volunteering we adopt a paradox lens and build on the inductive exploration of qualitative data by interviewing 20 managers overseeing corporate volunteering programs in large German corporations. We develop an integrative framework for the identification and characteristics of tensions in corporate volunteering. With our article we demonstrate that organizations experience higher ranked tensions, which affect all corporations, and individual tensions emerging from corporate efforts to manage meaning in corporate volunteering. And we identified three stages of corporate volunteering: early-, mid- and late-stage corporate volunteering. By uncovering tensions of corporate volunteering and examples of how other companies solve the challenges of managing ‘meaningful’ corporate volunteering, we seek to explain how firms attempt to align organizational purpose and individual, employee-driven constructions of what constitutes as meaningful corporate volunteering.

Tackling grand societal challenges requires joint transboundary responses by actors from subsystems with conflicting logics. While transcending these conflicting logics entails diffusing hybrid logics in fields, hybridization encounters resistance and communication problems arising from, e.g., social or ecological versus economic logics. Research on field hybridization from an institutional logics perspective has yielded insights into how these problems can be overcome in centralized fields by breaking powerful dominant logics or establishing governance mechanisms that promote collaborations between non-profit and for-profit organizations. However, we lack insights into hybridization in fragmented fields characterized by the coexistence of uncoordinated but interdependent actors with no dominant logic or governance mechanisms. Drawing on an embedded case study of a circular economy startup in Germany, we reveal how social enterprises can act as “hybrid referents” to overcome coordination gaps between different functional subsystems and encourage the adoption of ecological goals, thereby contributing to the overall hybridization of the field over time. Our study bridges field research on institutional logics with systems theory to advance the literature on hybrid organizing and social enterprises by emphasizing the systemic interdependencies involved in multilevel hybridization processes and introducing the concept of “impasse” and the mechanism of “structural coupling” to explain field hybridization.