Venture Philanthropy and Practice Variations: The Interplay of Institutional Logics and Organizational Identities

While institutional logics and organizational identity become effective theoretical lenses to analyze hybrid organizations, the literature often focuses on tensions between multiple logics or multiple identities and remains relatively silent regarding how logics and identities simultaneously constrain organizations and how organizations respond to incompatibilities as well as compatibilities between logic and identity. To address this gap, the present study draws from burgeoning research that theorizes identity as an integral part of the mechanism from which logics shape organizational decision making. I examined how social-welfare/commercial logics and social/businesslike identities directly and indirectly shape 138 organizations’ practices of venture philanthropy—a hybrid approach combining philanthropy and venture capitalism. The findings confirm identity’s overall mediating effects and offer new theoretical insights into organizational responses to logic–identity incompatibility, especially the dominant role of social identity in consistently suppressing external pressures from commercial logic, whereas businesslike identity overcomes social-welfare logic only associated with the nonprofit status.

Crowd Funding

Financing is an essential element for running any organization without which an organization cannot even be created. With many new organizations coming up and foreign companies entering into the market competition has touched its peak. This is valid even for scenarios where companies have to face a cut-throat competition to get the investors for themselves. New and booming startups have to compete with already establish companies where they are generally less preferred as an investment option by the investors who eventually choose big companies because of their return. Thus, new methods of financing such as crowd funding are making their way into present day business environment. Crowd funding has been positioned as a viable option in line with traditional methods of financing such as venture capitalism and angel investments. Crowd funding has gain popularity among new and inexperienced entrepreneurs and for getting money to carry out social, cultural and environmental projects. Various crowd funding platforms have come up with different pricing and operational strategies.