8 Beyond a niche approach: Could social business become the norm?

The public health crisis spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic has been anything but isolated: it has revealed and deepened both economic and social crises characterized by rising inequalities, unfolding against the backdrop of an increasingly severe environmental crisis. Research across the natural and social sciences underscores the role of corporations in not only contributing to these crises but deepening them (Amis et al., 2020). The exclusive focus on profit maximization that has been the dominant mantra in the corporate world over the past decades has been associated with environmental destruction and rising inequalities (Armour & Gordon, 2014; Lazonick & O’Sullivan, 2000; Stout, 2012). These inequalities have, in turn, endangered democracies and their stability, as exemplified by the rise of far-right and authoritarian leaders who have gained influence around the globe (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018), and who often deny the existence of the climate crisis (Lockwood, 2018; Schaller & Carius, 2019).

This multidimensional crisis threatens our collective safety and longevity on Earth, our only home. It also threatens the gains that movements of the past have made to expand rights and opportunities and it threatens the democracies past generations have fought to create and strengthen in order to share power and prevent atrocities (Freedom House, 2022). Research across the social and natural sciences underscores the danger of the status quo (Brown, 2019; IPCC, 2022; Stiglitz, 2012). These crises make clear that our social and economic systems must change.

In this context, there is an imperative to examine how alternative forms of organizing—ones that diverge from the dominant corporate model focused solely on profit maximization—can help confront this multidimensional crisis. As we consider the critical question of how to reimagine our economic system, there is much to learn from the social economy, which has long been home to diverse types of organizations that diverge from the dominant corporate model (Battilana, 2015). It has been a venue for experimental and innovative organizational models that pursue collective wellbeing rather than solely profit maximization. Among the plethora of social economy organizations ranging from foundations to civic associations and co-operatives, some are hybrid organizations that pursue social and environmental goals alongside financial ones, thereby combining aspects of typical for-profits and not-for-profit organizations (Battilana, 2018; Battilana & Lee, 2014; Besharov & Smith, 2014). Such social businesses, also often referred to as social enterprises (Dacin et al., 2011; Dees, 2001; Mair, 2010; Mair & Martí, 2006), are not new. Some have existed for decades or longer, and they provide a useful vantage point from which to reimagine the corporate model. As such, in contrast to the neoliberal refrain that the social sector should learn from the business world, we suggest that there is much that the mainstream business world can—and must—learn from alternative models of organizing that have developed in the social economy. Innovations stemming from the social economy can help reimagine corporations and spur change in the broader economy.

Yet, over the past decades, the social economy has tended to evolve in parallel with the rest of the economy, seemingly implying that some businesses could legitimately focus solely on maximizing profit and returns to shareholders, while more socially minded entrepreneurs, business leaders, and workers could make the decision to join the social economy. This separation between the market economy and the social economy has enabled social businesses to establish their legitimacy as alternative forms of organizing in the social economy, partially insulated from the market pressures of profit maximization at the expense of all else. But this dichotomy has also prevented the social economy from moving beyond its niche.

Today we find ourselves at a crossroads. On the one hand, the status quo might persist: the social economy could continue to evolve in parallel with the rest of the economy, resulting in a social economy that remains niche. This scenario presents two significant risks. The first risk is to social businesses, as remaining niche may ultimately threaten their survival. If social businesses remain a minority in a world driven solely by profit maximization, they will have continued difficulty accessing necessary resources because of their lack of alignment with dominant organizational forms (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Meyer & Rowan, 1977), and so will struggle to survive. The second risk is one for all of us as a society: if the sole pursuit of profit maximization remains the driving force of the business world, then inequalities will continue to increase and we will continue to destroy our natural ecosystems at a speed that endangers not only other species but also our own (Battilana, 2022). Alternatively, some of the organizational models pioneered within the social economy, such as the hybrid models adopted by social businesses, could permeate into the broader economy. This permeation of social business models would contribute to changing the way business is done, enabling the pursuit of social and environmental goals alongside financial ones to become the norm.

Because of the risks associated with the status quo, we argue for the need not only to examine the factors that will enable the social economy to thrive in the years to come, but also to explore how alternative models of organizing stemming from the social economy, specifically the category of social businesses, can help recast the corporate model. Accordingly, in this chapter, instead of endorsing the well-established mantra that social economy organizations should turn to businesses to learn how to operate more effectively, we explore what social businesses can teach us about the transition to a corporate model and economic system no longer exclusively focused on profit maximization, but rather organized around the pursuit of social and environmental goals alongside financial ones. As calls for corporations to transform themselves abound (Henderson, 2020; Gulati, 2022; Kaplan, 2019; Serafeim, 2022), we propose that what we have learned from social businesses can serve as a roadmap not only to change corporations themselves, but also to reform the institutional context in which they operate to better support both social businesses and companies that may try to emulate them. In doing so, this chapter draws the contours of an institutional environment that rewires incentive structures and norms so businesses are guided by, and held accountable for, their social and environmental impacts in addition to their financial goals.

Though today the social economy exists largely in parallel to the dominant market economy, these two spheres have not always been so separate. Instead, this dichotomy is the result of well-documented historical trends. We turn first to the evolution of business norms towards the sole pursuit of profit maximization. Second, we trace the history of the development and growth of the social economy, sometimes entwined with and at other times separated from the dominant market economy.

The ubiquity of the shareholder value maximization paradigm in the past decades belies the fact that an emphasis on increasing profit and share price above all else was not always the dominant capitalist model. For instance, a 1932 article in the Harvard Law Review argued that corporations should incorporate social goals alongside financial ones (Dodd, 1932). In fact, for much of the first part of the twentieth century, corporate leaders held that corporations needed to serve not only their equity shareholders, but also their ‘customers, creditors, employees, suppliers, and the broader society’ (Stout, 2013, p. 2004). This is not to say that this awareness prevented corporations from exploiting workers (federal labour protections were only won in the 1930s in the United States, for example), fighting unions, enforcing racist Jim Crow laws, discriminating against women, or damaging the environment; in many cases, they reproduced the dominant power hierarchies and social exclusions of the times. It merely suggests that the idea of a corporation’s responsibility to society, above and beyond maximizing profits, was not nearly so alien in the early twentieth century as it has been over the past decades.

Emphasis on service to society at large was reflected by early professional managers, who developed a wide lens regarding whom corporations were meant to serve (Khurana, 2007). But this led to the so-called agency cost problem for the owners and shareholders of companies. The agency cost problem refers to the risk that the interests of investors and shareholders (i.e., ‘principals’) may not be aligned completely with the interests of company leadership, managers, and executives (i.e., ‘agents’) (Jensen & Meckling, 1976). Around the same time, economists created and refined principles that would be used to justify ‘shareholder primacy’ by positing that the sole purpose of corporations was to make money (see Friedman, 1970). Adopting this new model of shareholder primacy was viewed as a way to mitigate the agency cost problem.

The articulation of the agency cost problem and the development of the concept of shareholder primacy buttressed a change that would permeate throughout the global economic system, deepening the divergence between the social economy and the market economy. This trend, combined with doubts raised about the then-dominant model of management that looked beyond just shareholders (see Stout, 2013; Khurana, 2007), created a new class of assertive investors, who in turn embraced shareholder primacy and supported its spread. The primary objective of successful executives was increasingly framed, both in companies and at institutions of higher learning, as an effort to exclusively create financial value for shareholders without regard for anything else. New managers exposed to this model as their default ideal of corporate governance reinforced shareholder primacy in the companies they joined (Smith & Rönnegard, 2014), including not only corporations based in the United States but also companies around the world (Canals, 2012). The World Bank and International Monetary Fund also routinely recommended the United States’ model of corporate governance, including a focus on shareholder value maximization, to developing countries (Singh et al., 2005) and the structural adjustment programmes they imposed also induced a shift towards this corporate governance model (Reed, 2002). These pathways helped shareholder primacy permeate much of the international financial market.

The global dominance of shareholder value maximization as a business imperative has had important social and environmental consequences. CEO compensation has soared, often tied to stock prices, while workers’ real wages have stagnated. For example, in the United States, while CEO compensation grew by 1,460 percent between 1978 and 2021, wages for average workers increased by only 18.1 percent during the same period (Bivens & Kandra, 2022). In many cases, emphasis on profit maximization has also prompted the use of layoffs, precarious scheduling, and understaffing, which have been detrimental to workers’ physical and mental health and their economic security (Kalleberg, 2011; Kelly & Moen, 2020; Pfeffer, 2018; Schneider & Harknett, 2019; Wood, 2020).

The focus on shareholder value maximization has also accelerated the world towards ‘climate catastrophe’ (UN News, 2022), as corporations have made lofty commitments but continue to prioritize profits over people and the planet. Research by Wright and Nyberg (2017) has revealed the difficulty that the pursuit of profit maximization presents for a reorganization of business practices around environmental goals. In their longitudinal study of major Australian corporations, they find that even those who had initially made strong climate commitments ultimately exhibited ‘a regressive pattern toward traditional business concerns over time’ because of ‘market imperatives’ (Wright & Nyberg, 2017, p. 1655). The norms and practices of business as usual have contributed to today’s multidimensional crisis, underscoring the need for a new model that meets individual and collective needs, sustainably. One ecosystem has aimed to do just that: the social economy. Its long and vibrant history reveals hundreds of years of innovations, as humans have built alternative systems, with different operating logics, values, norms, and incentives.

In parallel to the dominant market economy, the social economy has charted its own path as the ecosystem that houses non-profit organizations as well as co-operatives, associations, foundations, and private forms of social enterprise (Defourny & Nyssens, 2008). Though the boundaries between the dominant market economy and the social economy may have been more porous in the past, the social economy has its own rich history. Dating back to the nineteenth century, amid the dire social conditions of the European industrial revolution, ideas about the welfare of workers and communities emerged and quickly gained traction across the continent. Faced with precarity and hardship, the new industrial working class turned to each other, building networks of solidarity to meet their needs: from mutual aid funds to insure against illness or accidents, and food banks and consumer co-operatives to buy and trade food, clothes, and other essential goods, to worker co-operatives to regain control over the means of production (Moulaert & Ailenei, 2005). Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, innovative organizational forms were institutionalized in the social economy in order to respond to the needs of people and communities (Moulaert & Ailenei, 2005). The concept of ‘social enterprise’ (sometimes used synonymously with ‘social business’) was initially developed in the early 1980s (Defourny & Nyssens, 2010; Spreckley, 1981), and first took root as a distinct legal form in Italy in the 1990s. These organizations, oriented towards meeting previously unmet local needs while providing stable sources of work and income for marginalized populations, were legally recognized by the country’s parliament as ‘social cooperatives’ in 1991 (Defourny & Nyssens, 2008).

The social economy has grown considerably in recent decades; a 2017 report commissioned by the European Economic and Social Committee estimated that the social economy in Europe alone represents 13.6 million paid jobs and almost 83 million volunteers spread over 2.3 million enterprises (Monzón & Chaves, 2017). In other regions, two reports estimate that there are between half a million and one million social enterprises in Southeast Asia (British Council et al., 2021), and that social enterprises are responsible for between 28 and 41 million jobs in Sub-Saharan Africa (Richardson et al. 2020; for a recent summary of global data, see: World Economic Forum, 2022). Many countries around the world have joined the movement, adopting their own legal recognition of social enterprises, which we explore in the following sections.

Though social enterprises have a long history of balancing social and environmental goals alongside financial sustainability, the category remains fluid. The EMES European research network, composed of established university research centres and individual researchers, has developed criteria that are not intended as prescriptive but rather aim to delimit the ‘ideal type’ of social enterprise (Defourny & Nyssens, 2008). They develop several indicators across their evaluative criteria, including: (i) An explicit aim to benefit the community (moving beyond mere profit maximization) (ii) launched by a group of citizens responding to a need they face (iii) with democratic decision-making for organizational members, rather than decision-making based on capital ownership, and with (iv) stakeholder participation and (v) limited profit maximization and distribution unless it furthers the social aims of the organization. The EMES indicators, though not prescriptive or unanimous, nonetheless highlight the growing consensus that European social enterprises are characterized by a commitment to democratic decision-making, and to service to their members and to their communities (Defourny & Develtere, 2000). Broadly, these organizations, which are also at times referred to in the literature as social businesses (Santos et al., 2015), diverge from dominant organizational forms in both the social and business sectors. As such, they are hybrid organizations with social, environmental, and financial goals each at the heart of their operations (Battilana & Lee, 2014).

For the purpose of reimagining the corporate model, the field of research that has studied these social businesses, a subset of social economy organizations, is especially pertinent. Indeed, the existential imperative we face to shift away from a model of shareholder value maximization towards a system of production and exchange of goods and services that centres collective welfare and environmental sustainability makes social businesses worthy of study. Whereas the dominant corporate model is driven by shareholder value maximization and short-term profit generation, the social economy, including social businesses, centres on shared values of care, support, and solidarity (Amin et al., 2002). When faced with difficult economic decisions, a traditional firm might lay off thousands of workers to maintain profit growth and pay out dividends to shareholders, as exemplified during the COVID-19 pandemic (Useem, 2020). By contrast, a social business might open the decision to all their stakeholders; in fact, worker participation in strategic decision-making has been associated with the minimization of negative social effects such as layoffs and unemployment (Gregorič & Rapp, 2019). By disentangling their operations from the obligation to fulfil shareholder value maximization, social businesses show that an alternative model is possible.

Although they have generated great hopes as alternative forms of organizing, social businesses face their own set of unique challenges. Research (e.g., Battilana & Dorado, 2010; Battilana et al., 2017; Battilana, 2018) has documented and examined the hybrid nature of these organizations, which diverge from dominant organizational forms in both the social and business sectors. Straddling categories as they do is not easy. Far from it. When organizations fall between established categories, it is harder for them to be regarded as legitimate (Hsu et al., 2009; Ruef & Patterson, 2009; Zuckerman, 1999). But research on social businesses also highlights activities these organizations can engage in to mitigate the challenges they face. We turn to these challenges, and their mitigants, in the following section.

Constantly having to adjudicate between competing social, environmental, and financial goals requires social businesses to regularly make tradeoffs. Some scholars have argued that these tradeoffs do not exist, yet both qualitative and quantitative research reveal that they do, and that social businesses constantly face them (Battilana et al., 2022). Admittedly, certain organizational configurations, such as limitations on profit generation and redistribution, may exert less financial pressure on an organization. Nevertheless, the necessity of financial sustainability for all social businesses exerts some financial pressure, leading to tradeoffs. These, in turn, generate unique challenges for social businesses, including challenges related to access to tangible resources as well as intangible identity tensions (Battilana, 2018).

Research in organization studies has enabled us to learn a great deal about the practices in which social businesses can engage to deal with these tradeoffs. But, as we will see, engaging in these practices is neither easy nor sufficient to overcome all the challenges these organizations face. We will begin this section by briefly sketching the challenges social businesses currently experience, then we will address what we have learned about how these organizations can alleviate these challenges.

Social businesses face challenges relating to the allocation of funding and talent, internally and externally. On the internal front, in their study of work integration social enterprises (WISEs) in France, Battilana et al. (2015) found that tensions arise between social workers—who help the long-term unemployed people that WISEs hire to build skills and re-enter the job market—and production managers—who oversee worker productivity—about how much time employees should spend on the production line versus receiving mentorship and support. Externally, while the recent trend of impact investing has helped meet some of the funding needs of social businesses (Bugg-Levine & Emerson, 2011; Höchstädter & Scheck, 2015), qualitative and quantitative research (e.g., Battilana et al., 2017; Cobb et al., 2016; Lee, 2014; Spiess-Knafl & Scheck, 2019) indicates that social businesses still struggle to find funding. Additionally, because of the predominance of other organizational forms, it is difficult for social businesses to find employees who have the requisite experience in both the business and the social sectors. Employees that come from either sector may require different training, education, and organizational processes to allow them to identify with and successfully integrate the social business (Bacq et al., 2020; Battilana & Pache, 2018; Besharov, 2014).

Social businesses also face challenges related to organizational identity. The pursuit of joint financial and social objectives (Daudigeos & Valiorgue, 2018; Grenier & Bernardini-Perinciolo, 2015) creates identity tensions, because social businesses have to reconcile values (Besharov, 2014; Chandler, 2014; Glynn, 2000) often perceived as conflicting or competing (Château Terrisse, 2012; Poldner et al., 2017). This tension is compounded when different organizational members are found to be speaking ‘different languages’, one with an emphasis on social goals and the other with an emphasis on financial ones (Dean & McMullen, 2007). This tension can also create emotional distress for those working in social businesses (Ashforth et al., 2014; Bacq et al., 2020).

In the context of the broader market, it is worth noting that, until recently, there were few legal structures tailored to social businesses. And while some legal structures have been created that try to better fit their needs, unfamiliarity with and uncertainty about these new legal structures make utilizing them difficult. For instance, Marquis (2020) finds that legal concerns about transparency requirements for US benefit corporations have impeded uptake of this new legal form. Additionally, the legitimacy of social businesses is frequently an issue in the eyes of external partners, as partners from the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors approach social businesses with differing expectations and might be disappointed when social businesses do not meet those expectations (Aurini, 2006; Hsu, 2006; Hsu et al., 2009; Lallemand-Stempak, 2017; Pache & Santos, 2013).

Research has also helped identify practices in which social businesses can engage to effectively pursue and sustain multiple objectives (for reviews see Battilana, 2018; Doherty et al., 2014; Smith et al., 2013). Here, we highlight four sets of organizational practices that help mitigate the challenges social businesses face: setting and monitoring organizational goals, structuring organizational activities, selecting and socializing organizational members, and practising dual-minded leadership (Battilana et al., 2019). Though these practices are not sufficient to ensure that social businesses can break out of their niche, they remain important as intermediary measures on the path to broader changes to the institutional context.

While organizations of all types pursue multiple goals (Cyert & March, 1963; Gavetti et al., 2007; March & Simon, 1958; Simon, 1947), social businesses are unique in how opposed their social versus their financial goals may be perceived to be (Battilana, 2018). Multiple goals can be made salient for organizational members by institutionalizing multiple aims in an organization’s mission, bylaws, and policies (Ashforth & Reingen, 2014), and implementing success metrics for social, environmental, and financial goals can help prevent ‘mission drift’ (Smith & Besharov, 2019). Ambiguities around the causes and effects of social and environmental problems can make developing social performance metrics difficult (Ebrahim, 2019), but research has highlighted that progress can nonetheless be made by negotiating shared reference points with relevant stakeholders, which enables collaborative social and environmental metric development (Nason et al., 2018). Social businesses can also adopt social and environmental performance metrics developed by third party organizations, which include (among others) B Labs (Gehman & Grimes, 2017), the Global Reporting Initiative (Global Reporting Initiative, 2020), and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (Battilana & Norris, 2014), which merged with the International Integrated Reporting Council to form the Value Reporting Foundation in 2021.

The second set of practices, which centres on organizational activities, includes assessing whether activities are integrated—combining social, environmental, and financial impacts into one activity—or differentiated, with separate activities for social, environmental, and financial impacts respectively (see Galbraith, 1977; Lawrence & Lorsch, 1967; Mintzberg, 1979 for seminal work on organizational design and see Battilana & Lee, 2014; Battilana et al., 2017 for reviews of the application of this tradition to hybrid organizations). While integrated and differentiated organizations may approach the problem of coordination differently, ensuring that all goals are represented throughout the organization can help maintain a social business’ hybrid purpose. Designated spaces of negotiation, in which organizational members representing the social, environmental, and financial components of an organization’s activities meet to balance tradeoffs, can also help hybrid organizations like social businesses maintain their hybridity (Battilana et al., 2015).

Third, strategies surrounding the selection and socialization of organizational members present another way in which social businesses can work to alleviate the challenges that come with their dual nature. Research has found that hiring ‘pluralist managers’, who support social, environmental, and financial values, helps maintain hybridity (Besharov, 2014). Other social businesses employ workers who are oriented towards either the social/environmental or financial aspects of the business’ mission, sometimes by necessity given divisions in the broader economy and education trajectories. Such workers may require more intentional socialization to enable them to understand and value both social and environmental goals (Bacq et al., 2020). Finally, some social enterprises focus on hiring ‘blank slates’, candidates without experience in either social/environmental or financial contexts, for entry-level positions, making the hybrid model their first work experience (Battilana & Dorado, 2010). Regardless of which strategy is pursued, socialization is critical for teaching and reinforcing certain values and behaviours in organizational members (Ashforth & Mael, 1989; Van Maanen & Schein, 1979), both in formal systems for training and rewarding organizational members and in the informal processes through which members interact day-to-day (Ashforth et al., 2007; Feldman, 1976; Jones, 1986; Saks & Ashforth, 1997). In the context of social businesses, effective socialization of members reinforces social, environmental, and financial goals.

The fourth and final set of practices emphasizes practising dual-minded leadership, which manifests at the management level when organizational leaders ‘affirm, embody, and protect’ the organization’s financial, social, and environmental values and address tensions proactively (Battilana et al., 2019, p. 132). Dual-minded leaders in hybrid organizations do not attempt to avoid the inevitable appearance of financial/social/environmental tradeoffs, but instead work to identify outcomes that ensure the company as a whole maintains its focus on all aspects of its mission. Beyond top executives, board members can also help ensure an organization does not drift from its hybrid purpose. Intentional selection of board members with both business and social/environmental expertise can support an organization’s focus on multiple goals, though it may also lead to increased conflict (Battilana et al., 2019). This conflict may be overcome through appeal to a chairperson or executive director who can encourage both types of goals, and/or through a model of collegial governance, in which governance actors individually champion environmental, financial, and social goals respectively, while collectively adhering to the company’s multiple values (Bacq et al., 2020).

These various interventions have been found to help social businesses mitigate the challenges they face. But such internal strategies will not suffice to break social businesses out of their niche, enable them to thrive, and make them the norm. To access vital resources, organizations must be viewed as legitimate. This need to be legitimized impels organizations to comply with dominant norms, even though doing so may not be the best way to operate—neither for themselves nor for the stakeholders they serve (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Meyer & Rowan, 1977). To recast the corporate model, then, it is critical to change the institutional context in which businesses operate. In the next section, we identify three key levers for changing the institutional context: legal forms, sustainability metrics, and financial and fiscal strategies. Building on existing research, we argue that these three levers will prove instrumental in facilitating businesses’ transition from solely pursuing financial goals to pursuing—and being held accountable for—social and environmental goals alongside financial ones.

There is only so much that social businesses can do to survive in an environment that is not designed to support them. The institutional context in which these organizations operate has a significant impact on their success, both through its potential to lessen the intensity of the financial/social/environmental tradeoffs they face and by supporting the creation of new social businesses (Battilana et al., 2022). What we have learned from research on social businesses is not only what such organizations can do internally to try to mitigate the tensions they face, but also how the institutional context in which they operate plays a consequential role in shaping their emergence, resilience, and survival. For instance, we noted in the previous section the use of legal forms to help reduce and work through internal tensions. Yet, there remain important gaps in information, access, and coherence that act as barriers to the widespread adoption of such legal forms. Similarly, though individual organizations lean on metrics to set and evaluate their hybrid goals, the plurality of reporting systems, and their voluntary nature, inhibit broader accountability. At present, the status quo is still largely set up to support dominant organizational forms, leaving social economy organizations such as social businesses the task of navigating a system not designed for them. To make social businesses the new norm in the business world requires creating an institutional context that favours their development and success and encourages typical companies’ transition towards more sustainable ways of organizing aligned with social businesses. In particular, in this chapter, we emphasize three levers that can facilitate this shift. These are:

In the following sections, we consider existing advances in these three domains, their benefits and drawbacks, and potential for the future (for a summary see Table 8.1).

The range of legal forms available to entrepreneurs as they choose how to incorporate their organizations can play a determining role in how they structure their activities, influencing critical organizational decisions such as revenue structure, ownership and governance mechanisms, and sourcing and supply chain. If legal forms that have become associated with profit maximization remain the most available, widely known, and accessible forms, then exclusive focus on profit will continue to prevail, with all the devastating consequences outlined above. If, however, new legal forms are recognized, are made accessible, and become mainstream, organizations will be able to choose from among many forms and select one that truly suits their mission. This may also facilitate the adoption of laws that both incentivize and reward organizations which, by virtue of their legal status, bind themselves by law to integrating social and environmental considerations into their strategies and operations alongside financial considerations.

New legal forms have emerged around the world as a result of experimentation and innovation in the social economy. Among the first of these new legal forms developed over the past twenty years was the community interest company (CIC) in the United Kingdom, which has two noteworthy features that offer a potential remedy to the risk of deviating from or abandoning one’s social mission. The first is that CICs are subject to a Community Interest Test applied regularly by an oversight body, the CIC Regulator, to ensure that their operations continue to benefit society (Cross, 2004). The second is an asset lock, which ensures that a CIC’s assets are legally protected and retained for community benefit in perpetuity, even in the event that the CIC is sold, ceases operations, or attempts to convert to another legal form (Triponel & Agapitova, 2017). Similarly, in South Korea, social enterprises can take the form of social co-operatives, a legally protected form of organization that requires that its members meet specific criteria set by the Korea Social Enterprise Promotion Agency. As a requirement, these enterprises must provide national job-creation services, social services, local community contributions, or a combination of these. In addition, similarly to the British model, they are subject to an asset lock provision dictating the use of their resources in the event of dissolution (Triponel & Agapitova, 2017). Both models represent examples of how structural accountability mechanisms can be put in place to ensure companies and their leaders stay true to their mission and are held responsible for adhering to them. It is also worth noting, however, that the South Korean legal form, which was partially inspired by the UK model, has been criticized by some for not being adequately adapted to a new national context (Park et al., 2017), highlighting the need to adapt these legal forms based on the local context with the involvement of stakeholders on the ground.

Meanwhile, in the United States, a popular legal form for social businesses is the benefit corporation,¹ a model championed by B Lab, the developer of the B Corp certification (Marquis, 2020; McDonnell, 2016). The benefit corporation was designed to alleviate the concerns of socially minded entrepreneurs that they might be legally exposed to claims by their shareholders should they decide to prioritize goals other than maximizing shareholders’ financial returns. The benefit corporation form explicitly requires consideration of the needs of stakeholders beyond just shareholders. Some have argued that this legal form does not go far enough, however, as shareholders can unilaterally discard the social purpose of a benefit corporation by voting to reincorporate or by amending its articles of incorporation to alter its legal form (Reiser & Dean, 2017).²

In 2016 Italy became the first European state to mimic the US benefit corporation legislation, with the creation of the Società Benefit, a hybrid corporate form that allows profit-seeking companies to declare a social and environmental purpose, which the company’s directors are responsible for protecting (Nigri et al., 2020). In turn, in 2019 France passed the PACTE law, which, among other changes, revised the French civil code to allow any new or existing French company, regardless of its legal form, to become a société à mission without changing its underlying legal form or status (Bercy Infos, 2022). To become a société à mission, a company must include a motive (‘raison d’être’) in their articles of association that highlights the organization’s social and environmental objectives. To maintain its status, every two years the société à mission must undergo a verification process by an independent third party organization. However, société à mission represents a voluntary designation that a company can adopt, and the only consequence for a company found not to be working toward its stated social or environmental goals is that it will be forced to drop the designation (Bercy Infos, 2022). Nonetheless, its implementation comes as a further step in France’s commitment to non-financial corporate goals in its economy.

While these legal forms represent one way in which organizations can legally constitute themselves, they are far from the only way. Legal forms that centre on full participation of workers in decision-making also make up an important part of the social economy.

A long tradition of scholarship underscores the risk that typical hierarchical organizations may succumb to market pressure and deviate from their social/environmental goals in the quest for organizational survival and efficiency (Selznick, 1949; Weber, 1946). Meanwhile, research on hybrid organizations and co-operatives suggests that organizations with democratic decision-making processes may be better at avoiding mission drift and balancing their multiple objectives (Battilana et al., 2018). Leaning on the strength of political democracy at mending diverse values and viewpoints, they suggest that democratic decision-making provides spaces of negotiation where productive tensions between social, environmental, and financial imperatives can surface and be deliberated. This insight shines light on the role that democratic ways of organizing could play in accelerating the shift from the single-minded pursuit of profit to a balanced pursuit of multiple objectives.

Co-operatives have a long and rich history of workplace democracy around the world. Their legal form centres on democratic decision-making in which all members are allowed to vote on critical strategic measures, regardless of capital ownership and contribution (Fici, 2013). Beyond co-operatives, though, legal requirements for board-level employee representation are another conduit for democratic decision-making. These requirements also have a long history, particularly in Europe. In Germany, for instance, a system of codetermination in work has antecedents dating back well into the nineteenth century, and the first German law on codetermination was passed in 1920 (Zahn, 2015). This system legally requires that workers in companies over a certain size comprise either one third or one half of the total membership of a company’s board.³ This second condition, required for corporations of 2,000 or more employees, is a quasi-parity model. This means that, while the number of seats on German boards is evenly divided between shareholders and employees, in the event of a tie the tiebreaking vote is cast by the chairman of the board, who is appointed solely by shareholders (Addison, 2009). Worker board representatives are selected by work councils, which represent workers in negotiations with management and coordinate with national unions.

Germany is not unique in having adopted codetermination laws. Other European Union countries, such as Sweden and Austria, have also implemented similar laws (Munkholm, 2018). Though more research into the benefits and drawbacks of the codetermination model is needed, as is the case for many of the models we discuss, a meta-analysis of codetermination studies has found no significant difference in productivity or performance between organizations with and without codetermination (Addison, 2009). Additionally, German firms that adhere to codetermination are less likely to lay off workers in times of social and economic crises (Gregorič & Rapp, 2019; Kim et al., 2018), which lends initial evidence to the idea that codetermination enables the interests of workers, not only shareholders, to guide decision-making.

Despite the plethora of legal forms extant around the world, no widely adopted unifying framework has yet emerged. Those who wish to adopt a hybrid legal form may face barriers, notably a lack of awareness of each form’s existence, benefits, and implications, as well as varying legal treatment across countries, which add to the complexity of navigating these alternative legal forms (Aguirre, 2021; Bohinc & Schwartz, 2021; Reiser, 2011, 2013). The European Union has made some strides in providing a more uniform legal structure for social businesses through the development and adoption of European Cooperative Society (SCE) regulation in 2003. This legal structure, aimed specifically at co-operatives, provides organizations that meet certain criteria the ability to operate within the entire European Economic Community without the need to establish subsidiaries in each individual nation. A report by the European Commission, however, found that uptake has been limited, in part due to minimum capital requirements and the form’s legal complexity and setup costs.

On the research front, the European Commission’s multi-year mapping exercise has catalogued various models of social enterprise within Europe (e.g., Hulgård & Chodorkoff, 2019; for a comparative synthesis, see Borzaga et al., 2020). In a further move towards standardization, the European Union’s Social Business Initiative established an operationalized definition of social enterprises in 2011. Then in April 2022, in collaboration with the European Union, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development published a guidance manual (OECD, 2022) for policy-makers to better assess the rationale and tools needed to develop unified legal frameworks for social enterprises. This development represents a step forward in the process of providing social businesses with better legal recognition, but more work is needed to help improve the legal structures available to them. One question facing the international community is whether a unified legal framework for social businesses should be created, and, if so, what should be included in it. A unified framework could help overcome the current informational, bureaucratic, and financial barriers to adopting new legal forms while providing these organizations with increased legitimacy, and would also open the door to governments rewarding or incentivizing organizations that adopt these legal forms. This raises the next crucial point: to regulate rewards and/or incentives for businesses to adopt socially and environmentally beneficial models, social and environmental metrics will prove critical.

While in theory commendable, the many recent public announcements of the intentions of corporations to pursue goals beyond shareholder value maximization have proved insufficient to drive real change. For instance, a 2019 announcement by the Business Roundtable, an organization of which the CEOs of most major US corporations are members, indicated that corporations should consider the interests of not only their shareholders, but also their customers, employees, and society at large (Business Roundtable, 2019). Yet a recent analysis (see Wry et al., 2021) found that corporations that signed the Business Roundtable statement were actually 20 per cent more likely than corporations that did not sign it to fire their employees at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Signatories were also less likely to donate to relief efforts, to offer customer discounts, and to shift production to pandemic-related goods than non-signatories.

In contrast to announcements of good intentions, research has proven the importance of accountability metrics in influencing corporate behaviour (Dobbin et al., 2015; Marquis, 2020). For instance, in 1973, in an effort to bring consistency and comparability to the financial reporting process, the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) established that the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), a private body, would set the accounting standards for public companies (SEC, 1973, 2003). While many organizations are working to develop metrics for social and environmental behaviour, there is not yet a unified and officially sanctioned set of standards in the social and environmental arenas, leaving the door open to ‘impact washing’ and ‘green washing’ (impact washing’s environmental equivalent). We turn to some of the many organizations currently developing social and environmental metrics in the following section.

The past decades have seen a rise in recognition that current metrics for evaluating businesses, predicated solely on financial returns, do not capture the true impacts and costs of businesses to society. One of the first organizations that aimed to systematically capture the environmental and social impacts of businesses, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), was founded in 1997 partially as a response to public outcry following the Exxon Valdez oil spill (Global Reporting Initiative, 2020). In 2000, the GRI released the first global framework for sustainability reporting. In the years that followed, several other organizations that aimed to more comprehensively account for business impacts were founded, including the CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project) in 2002, the Climate Disclosure Standards Board (CDSB) in 2007, the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) in 2010, and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) in 2011, among many others.

However, feedback from a variety of stakeholders in the past decade revealed that the heterogeneity of reporting standards was creating confusion both for companies earnestly attempting to report on their sustainability performance, and for investors or other stakeholders aiming to hold companies accountable for their performance on these dimensions. As a response to this confusion, in September 2020, the GRI, CDP, CDSB, IIRC, and SASB released a joint statement of intent announcing a shared vision for a comprehensive corporate sustainability reporting system (CDP et al., 2020a). In December 2020, they released a joint prototype of climate-related financial disclosure (CDP et al., 2020b). The GRI and SASB subsequently collaborated on a report explaining how to effectively utilize both GRI and SASB standards in sustainability reporting (GRI & SASB, 2021). These efforts to work more closely together have spurred a wave of consolidation in the sustainability metrics space. In June 2021, SASB and the IIRC merged to form the Value Reporting Foundation (Value Reporting Framework, 2021). The Value Reporting Foundation in turn was consolidated with the CDSB into the International Sustainability Standards Board under the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) Foundation in August 2022 (Integrated Reporting, 2022).

While this move toward greater alignment in the industry is promising, substantive issues remain. Of particular importance is the fact that the mere existence of metrics, even if they are well aligned, is not enough to ensure that companies actually change their behaviour to align with their stated social, environmental, and financial goals (Rogers, 2019). One major criticism of existing metrics is that they allow corporations to conflate their sustainability measurement with making efforts to actually become more sustainable (Milne & Gray, 2012; see also Barkemeyer et al., 2015; Flower, 2015). Reinforcing this point, one study found that companies using the GRI framework engaged in several legitimizing strategies when they reported negative sustainability outcomes, many of which were symbolic as opposed to substantive (Hahn & Lülfs, 2014). The same study notes that, because of the GRI’s voluntary nature, there are limited ways for the GRI to increase reporting on negative aspects of companies’ sustainability performance, but speculates that mandatory regulation might be able to do so.

The European Union is taking a first step in this direction. In 2021, the European Commission endorsed a proposal for a comprehensive collection of measures aimed at directing resources towards sustainable enterprise in Europe called the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) (European Commission, 2021a). The CSRD will expand on the 2014 Non-Financial Reporting Directive, which required companies with more than 500 employees to report on a predefined list of non-financial issues, such as environmental impact and respect for human rights (European Commission, 2022). Entering into force in January 2023, the CSRD requires all large companies and all companies listed on EU regulated markets (except listed microcompanies) to report on non-financial metrics for financial years beginning in 2024 (European Commission, 2021b). The directive suggests that the ultimate language adopted for these metrics should be developed through consultation with a number of key stakeholders, including technical advice from the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group and with an opinion required from the European Securities and Markets Authority. However, the CSRD remains a tool for reporting, and does not require companies to take action to change their practices if they are found to be socially and environmentally harmful. Further government action, then, is likely needed to ensure that organizations take substantive steps to improve their social and environmental impacts, as opposed to merely citing the measures themselves as a sign of progress.

Developing and maintaining a convergent set of sustainability standards is not merely a technical process. It entails important political decisions, as we as a society must decide what we value and hence what to measure. So far, many organizations have set standards that are guided by their own principles and methodologies. But these choices have critical implications for all of us collectively. For instance, many standard-setting organizations focus on environmental sustainability. This issue is a critical one, and indeed more must be done to avert the worst impacts of climate change and environmental degradation. However, this focus alone is not enough to ensure that both humans and the planet are placed at the heart of our economic system: what of worker sustainability and wellbeing? Do we wish to measure a corporation’s impact on social cohesion and inequality? What about the number of jobs created compared to those laid off? And should we require corporations to report how they use profit—whether it is redistributed widely, reinvested in better services, or paid out to shareholders? The progress on the environmental dimensions is critical, and must continue, but progress on social metric development is still lagging. The #MeToo movement, followed by the murder of George Floyd and massive Black Lives Matter protests around the world, certainly accelerated talk of diversity, equity, and inclusion, though research underscores the importance of moving beyond one-off trainings and reorganizing the very distribution of resources and power in organizations (Dobbin & Kalev, 2018; Kalev et al., 2006). The ‘Great Resignation’ and high-profile unionization efforts have also put worker power, and power sharing, on the agenda, as scholars and researchers put forth mechanisms for giving workers, who can be seen as ‘labour investors’, formal governance power (Ferreras, 2017).

These are important questions with important collective ramifications. Their answers will guide the contours of our new economic system. The exercise of setting sustainability standards is thus not merely technical, but profoundly political. It requires deliberation and exchange as members of society decide together the standards to which companies should be held accountable. Hence, we must ensure that the bodies tasked with creating and updating sustainability standards as they evolve over time enable power sharing by including workers, environmental groups, affected communities, and other key stakeholders. If these standards are developed behind closed doors, or with mere consultation but without shared decision-making power, they risk perpetuating forms of exclusion and bias that result from existing power hierarchies (Battilana & Casciaro, 2021).

Also key in this process will be ensuring that minimum thresholds for organizational performance are established, such that exceptional performance on one metric does not enable a company to skirt its obligations on other fronts. For instance, a company that performs exceptionally well in its work to limit carbon emissions should not be given licence to underpay or disempower its workers and still receive high marks as a result, and vice versa. Instead, standard-setting bodies, which must themselves represent diverse stakeholders, should ensure that organizations meet standards that enhance environmental sustainability as well as human sustainability for their workers, local communities, and other stakeholders. Leveraging the need for funding may well be one way to incentivize the adoption of ambitious social and environmental targets.

Entrepreneurs, business leaders, and workers need capital to start and grow organizations in the social economy as they do in the traditional economy. The availability of designated funds, tailored to the realities of social businesses, as well as the stipulations associated with these funds can influence how an organization develops and whether it thrives. We survey some of the options available to social businesses, and identify areas for improvement and further research, in what follows.

One area that has received much attention in recent years is the emergent impact investing sector, which was estimated at approximately $715 billion in 2020. Coined in 2007 by the Rockefeller Foundation, the term ‘impact investing’ is distinguished from its predecessor ‘socially responsible investing’ (SRI) in that while SRI focuses on avoiding the provision of financial support to organizations that harm society or the environment, impact investing focuses on providing funding to organizations creating a positive impact, not merely avoiding negative ones (Marquis, 2020). Both practitioners and academics have converged on similar definitions of impact investing, though important discrepancies remain, including the eligibility of investees according to their organizational or financial structures (Höchstädter & Scheck, 2015).

Yet despite the remarkable growth of the impact investing market, the most frequently cited issue in the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN)’s 2020 annual survey was the (lack of) availability of appropriate capital across the risk/return spectrum. Additionally, as the impact investing market matures, so too do concerns among practitioners about the potential for ‘impact washing’ (i.e. deceptive practices by which companies falsely claim their investments have a positive social impact). Concerns about impact washing were the most cited challenge that surveyed impact investors expect to face in the coming years (GIIN, 2020). Establishing a unified baseline of transparency for funders and organizations to adhere to could help alleviate these concerns, while also helping ensure organizations are held responsible for their stated versus achieved social and environmental goals.

Small-scale investing is another method for funding certain organizations in the social economy. The history of collecting many small donations in order to support a larger effort is obviously not a new one; Joseph Pulitzer employed just such a campaign in support of the Statue of Liberty more than 130 years ago (Fleming & Sorenson, 2016). Crowdfunding has come to prominence more recently because of platform technology’s ability to disintermediate between traditional financial institutions and small-scale funders. Several crowdfunding platforms have emerged with a focus on serving organizations with social or environmental aims; some of these platforms are themselves organized as social businesses (Renko et al., 2019). Research on the subject, however, has yet to reach a consensus about the link between crowdfunding and social or environmental goals. Some researchers have found that crowdfunding projects experience more success when they embrace a ‘sustainability orientation’ by highlighting social and/or environmental goals (Calic & Mosakowski, 2016), while others have found that social ventures perform best in a crowdfunding context when they highlight either their economic or their social benefits, but not both (Moss et al., 2018). Other research has found that traditional ‘commercial entrepreneurs’ on average raise much more capital than social entrepreneurs, though this average is somewhat skewed due to the inclusion of a small number of very successful commercial campaigns (Parhankangas & Renko, 2017). Despite disagreement in the literature, crowdfunding is still broadly viewed as a promising alternative to traditional sources of funding for organizations in the social economy (Farhoud et al., 2021; Lehner, 2013). The advent of sustainability-focused crowdfunding platforms in particular raises the possibility of crowdfunding as a funding mechanism to mitigate the challenges that social businesses face in raising capital from more traditional sources.

However, crowdfunding is not without its challenges, and more research on the effectiveness of crowdfunding platforms at providing social businesses with regular, sustainable funding is needed. Also worthy of further exploration are community funding options, which would enable members of local communities to directly pool resources to finance organizations that support positive social or environmental outcomes for their community. Such efforts for funding would help share power beyond large institutional investors to potentially local stakeholders who would both be supporters of and affected by a proposed initiative. While to date academic literature on community funding initiatives appears limited, a number of promising organizations have emerged in this space that are worthy of further study, including for instance the organizations that constitute the Seed Commons in the United States, which describes itself as ‘a national network of locally rooted, non-extractive loan funds that brings the power of big finance under community control’ (Seed Commons, 2021). Increased research attention to community funding may help uncover more critical insights that will prove important in ensuring community-oriented social businesses receive the funding needed to not only survive, but thrive.

The state certainly also has a critical role to play in funding social enterprises. In terms of directly supporting the financial needs of social businesses, international governmental support could build off examples like the European Union Social Entrepreneurship Funds (EuSEF) framework⁴ or the EUR 200 million microfinance and social entrepreneurship fund launched by the European Union, the European Investment Bank, and the European Investment Fund in late 2019.

In addition to direct funding, governments have also recently explored ‘pay for success’ models such as Social Impact Bonds (SIBs), through which a private investor partners with a not-for-profit to support the provision of a social service. If certain predefined outcomes are achieved, the external investor is entitled to a reimbursement from the government in addition to some return (Fraser et al., 2018). While the development of this funding model has been met with much interest and enthusiasm (Arena et al., 2016), recent research has highlighted a number of challenges, including that SIBs may represent a dissipation of government responsibility (McHugh et al. 2013), a financialization of the not-for-profit and public sectors (Cooper et al., 2016), and may increase emphasis on the most easily quantifiable social problems and on target beneficiaries most likely to succeed (Edmiston & Nicholls, 2017; Fraser et al., 2018; Warner, 2013).

Finally, legal forms, sustainability metrics, and funding converge around an important potential lever: fiscal policy. A recent example of fiscal policy being used to undergird prosocial impacts has been the adoption of climate-oriented policies, including carbon taxes and emissions trading schemes, in countries across the world. In Australia, for instance, a carbon tax that went into effect in 2012 reduced CO₂ emissions by between 11 and 17 million tons in the following two years (O’Gorman & Jotzo, 2014), the largest fall in greenhouse gas emissions for the nation in twenty-four years (Hannam, 2014). Unfortunately, the example of Australia also serves as a cautionary tale that highlights that such policies require political work to gain durable support. Only two years after it was implemented, Australia became ‘the first country in the world to abolish a functioning carbon pricing scheme’ (Dayton, 2014, p. 362). Critics condemned the GDP losses and rising electricity costs that resulted from the tax (Robson, 2014). Retroactive studies have examined the ultimate failure of this policy, including through the lens of elected political officials (Ike, 2020), and through the lens of public acceptance (Hammerle et al., 2021), both of which highlight the reality that such a change is political and cannot be viewed from a merely technical perspective.

So, fiscal policy can be used to incentivize the move towards and growth of social businesses, but careful attention must be paid to the political dimensions of such change. Informed by a careful and democratic convergence of standards, governments may adopt a progressive corporate taxation scheme which takes into account not just the financial standing of a company, but also its positive or negative social and environmental impacts. Just as companies are currently taxed based on their profits, so too could their fiscal treatment vary as a function of their social and environmental impacts. Implementing such a policy would require clear legal forms and consistent social and environmental reporting standards, emphasizing that these three levers for change should be pursued in concert with one another. Prototypes of such a system might be tested on a smaller scale, with research on their effectiveness informing wider implementation. By incentivizing positive impacts and/or penalizing negative impacts, such a policy would help address legitimate concerns that participation in sustainability measurement does not drive real change.

Today, the world faces a set of severe and interlocking crises, which include the ongoing public health challenges related to the COVID-19 pandemic, social and economic inequality, rising authoritarianism, and environmental degradation. Calls to reform our social and economic systems abound, and social businesses that are designed to put social and environmental concerns at their core alongside financial ones can be part of the answer to those calls. This alternative model of organizing may prove useful in devising an antidote to the excesses of the corporate system that has been dominant over the past decades.

But social businesses also face unique challenges that stem in part from an institutional context that favours shareholder primacy. As discussed, they cannot overcome these challenges on their own. While research has helped identify practices they can adopt to lessen the intensity of the financial/social/environmental tradeoffs they experience as they pursue multiple objectives (Battilana et al., 2022), these practices are not sufficient to ensure the success and growth of the social business sector.

Instead, the institutional context in which organizations operate must change so as to better support existing social businesses and incentivize a shift away from the dominant corporate model. We have discussed three potential levers that might drive change in the institutional context. First, creating accessible new legal structures can build the legitimacy of social businesses and help the pursuit of social and environmental goals permeate the corporate world. Second, converging on a comprehensive—and ambitious—measurement system can help ensure that companies disclose not only their financial standing, but also their social and environmental impacts. This is a key tool for holding them accountable for their actions and behaviours, helping to prevent green washing or impact washing. Finally, ensuring tailored funding is available to social businesses can serve to sustain and scale their impact. Importantly, when combined, clear legal structures and a unified measurement framework can equip policy-makers to reward companies that contribute to collective and climate welfare and penalize those that damage society and the planet. Though these specific suggestions are not exhaustive, legal forms that structure an organization’s obligations, ambitious measurements that hold companies accountable for more, funding that is channelled to organizations that contribute to a healthy environment and fair society, and fiscal policy that rewards (or penalizes) them based on their respective benefits and costs to society can help lay the foundations of a new economic system.

Given the diversity of social enterprise models, which treat profit generation, governance, ownership, and other organizational components differently, further research is necessary to tease apart the consequences, benefits, and challenges of each organizational form. Though no one model has yet emerged as the single alternative to the profit-maximizing firm, the plurality of models represents fertile ground for empirical research linking organizational form with costs and benefits to society. This line of inquiry may also inform further research on the effectiveness of coercive versus incentive-based policy-making in shifting corporate business models and behaviour. Finally, the emergent research and experimentation on degrowth, a socially sustainable and equitable reduction of society’s energy and resource use, and the quest for alternatives to growth-based development (Kallis et al., 2018) is also likely to intersect with this research agenda, especially with regards to metric development.

As the past decades have revealed, neoliberal logic has permeated throughout not merely the economic but also the social and public spheres. Hence, in closing, a disclaimer is necessary: the aim of this chapter—explaining how social business logic could permeate the corporate sector—is not a call for social business to permeate the social or public sectors. As the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, certain sectors serve society better when protected from market forces (Stiglitz, 2021). To address the multidimensional crises we face, this chapter does not argue for not-for-profits to adopt more business practices—a common refrain of the past decades. Instead, this chapter argues for the opposite: it is urgent that the logic and practices of the social economy permeate into the business world, paving the way for an alternative to neoliberal capitalism. This shift represents nothing short of reimagining the value and purpose of business in society.

Together, we have within our power the ability to help facilitate these critical changes, many of which are already being explored or have been adopted in part in different countries. But time is of the essence. We can decide to learn from the multidimensional crisis we are facing or continue with business as usual at our own and our planet’s peril. It is up to us, as workers, as consumers, and as citizens, to rise to this challenge to build a more just, equitable, and sustainable tomorrow.