Blurring the Boundaries Between the Social and Commercial Sectors with Lakshmi Ramarajan

This seminar explores how gender is enacted by founders of social ventures. In particular, Lakshmi Ramarajan looks at how female social venture founders conform to cultural beliefs about gender-appropriate activities and how this conformity may be reinforced or disrupted by characteristics of the environment in which they are embedded. She argues that the trend towards the use of commercial activities in social ventures is inconsistent with cultural beliefs about gender for female founders of social ventures. Using data on 590 new U.S.-based social ventures during 2007-2008, Ramarajan examined the conditions under which commercial activities are more or less likely to be used by female founders. Results show that female founders of social ventures are less likely to use commercial activities than male founders and that the social venture founders’ local community context moderates this effect in two ways: the prevalence of women-run businesses in the social venture founder`s local community weakens the enactment of gender, while the influence of gender on the use of commercial activities is stronger when the intended beneficiaries of the social ventures are local.

Speaker: Lakshmi Ramarajan, Assistant Professor of Business Administration, Organizational Behavior Unit, Harvard Business School