Our Business is Different: How are Inclusive and Sustainable Business Models Tackling Hybridity towards Sustainability?

The United Nations and the Agenda 2030 have clearly recognized the role of for-profit organizations in boosting sustainable development and reducing inequalities. This process has led to a profound change in International Development Cooperation (IDC), where private enterprises are called to develop Inclusive Businesses (IB) aligning business values with social impact, following responsible environmental, social, and governance standards. This result is often reached through the creation of Hybrids, combining different organizational logics (e.g., social and commercial). In this research, we will focus on this last aspect (sustainability). Using interviews and focus groups, we aim at highlights those elements of tensions that derive from hybrids and sustainability goals. Hybridization involves a mix of different organizational logic (e.g., commercial vs. social) that may have different outcomes (e.g., innovative patterns or challenges and disagreement); therefore, we aim to understand how hybridization has been reflected in Knowledge Management practices between local and international dimensions. Moreover, as businesses are asked to submit a project proposal to get access to funds by AICS (in line with Lundin et al., 2015), we aim to explore how organizational logic is affected by the institutional framework and social goals (Sabini and Alderman, 2021) provided by IDC (e.g., what elements differ from a traditional pattern of internationalization), and whether such tensions due to hybridity can be reconciled through sound knowledge management practices. While during the years, the former (inclusive and sustainable models) has experienced a growth in numbers and quality of the proposal, the latter (HR Management) seems confined to traditional practices that do not take into consideration the peculiarities of the local dimension, showing an increasing tension between business and social (and sustainable) goals.