Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore how bonding (i.e. tightly knit, emotionally close social relationships) and bridging social capital (i.e. outward looking open social relationships) affect opportunity recognition and innovation implementation in a cultural network of firms, investigating the main benefits of and drawbacks to both bonding and bridging social capital.Design/methodology/approach: The paper is based on a case study of a cultural network of firms which share the same norms, principles and values. The method adopted is content analysis of qualitative data.Findings: The authors find that in cultural network bridging social capital facilitates experimentation and combination of ideas from distant sources, while bonding social capital, which underpins the need for more conformity, is more effective for supporting innovation implementation. Innovation results from the interplay between the two dimensions of social capital, and each dimension contributes to the final outcome in a distinct and unique way.Research limitations/implications: There are some limitations which arise from the case study methodology; the limited set of industries analysed affects the generalizability of the findings.Practical implications: The research has some practical implications for firms that belong to cultural networks. It offers suggestions about how to manage social relationships in different stages of the innovation process.Originality/value: The authors examine the effects of bonding and bridging social capital on innovation in a cultural network of firms. The authors show that in a cultural network, different moments in the innovation process require different efforts related to the firm’s network relationships.

Although scholars of the nonprofit sector have looked at the theoretical implications of social enterprises (SEs), more details and clarification are desirable. In particular, most previous theoretical work refers to the nonprofit sector generically and fails to account for the particularities of organizations within a more general definition of SE. This article surveys previous theories and proposes a framework based on the theory of reciprocity and the concept of unconditional reciprocity to interpret a particular kind of SE: the Italian social cooperative.

Over the past two decades, organizational sustainability has been studied from several different perspectives, such as marketing, governance, strategy, and human resource management (HRM). However, sustainability framed in HRM has not yet received enough attention in the literature, especially as it concerns the study of different organizational forms. Building on Enhert and Harry’s (2012) sustainable HRM approach, this article studies worker empowerment and how it affects organizational performance in terms of service quality and service innovation. Specifically, it addresses how relational motivations interact with HR-empowering practices (involvement in decisions and task autonomy) as organizational resources in influencing performance, how workload pressure resulting from HR empowerment can improve performance, and the influence of gender on performance, especially with concerns for human capital (tertiary education) and motivations. To this end, a representative sample of workers employed by Italian social enterprises (ES) in the social service sector is used. We propose multilevel SEMs that are based on two sets of equations specifying worker- and organization-level effects on organizational performance. Our main results show that the combination of worker engagement and an appropriate relational context in the organizational environment is most conducive to delivering better and innovative services. In addition, a higher percentage of well-trained and relationally motivated women employees helps achieve this goal.

This article aims at delivering new theoretical interpretation and quantitative evidence concerning the emergence and development of social enterprises (SEs) in Italy. Where the former is concerned the article seeks to provide the core features necessary to identify when an organization can be defined as a SE. In particular, the analysis retraces the steps back to the intersection between “classical” studies on entrepreneurial non-profit organizations and the more recent literature on entrepreneurial action and social responsibility for the business enterprise. The institutional and quantitative analysis then focuses on the development of SEs in Italy, discussing the institutional evolution of the new legal forms, and the principal area of activity of SEs in Italy. This country represents a key player in the evolution of SEs as it pioneered legislation and practice in Europe and the emerging new frontier for modeling different types of SEs.

The world is no stranger to crises, and social enterprises struggle to both survive and deliver on mission. This study explores how public interventions can facilitate economic recovery through targeted assistance to social enterprises, specifically the Italian social cooperative. Despite their prevalence and beneficial impact on Italian communities, not all Italian social cooperatives are economically and/or financially healthy. So this study answers the following two research questions: what is the financial and economic condition of Italian social cooperatives, and how could scarce public resources be directed to social enterprises in order to further the goals of social policy? To assess financial and economic health, we conduct financial statement analysis based on data extracted from the AIDA database. This methodology makes it possible to analyze Italian social cooperatives with techniques designed to monitor the situation in terms of both financial balance (current ratio, warranty ratio, and equity multiplier) and of economic balance (ROA, ROI, and sustainability of financial charges). Using these ratios, we create a matrix of financial and economic health and then provide guidance on which level of public support in each classification is likely to provide the most overall societal benefit. Such analysis offers not only benefits to Italian policymakers and citizens, but is a topic of particular interest for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners around the world evaluating policy responses to crises such as COVID-19.