Doherty Emerging Professor of Entrepreneurial Leadership Elena Kennedy’s co-authored paper is published in the Public Management Review.
Elena Kennedy, Doherty Emerging Professor of Entrepreneurial Leadership in the Martha and Spencer Love School of Business, has co-authored the paper “Responding to Failure: The Promise of Market Mending for Social Enterprise,” which was published in Public Management Review.
Kennedy and co-author Erynn Beaton, assistant professor in the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at Ohio State University, identified two ways in which social organizations can respond to market failures – market reallocation and market mending – and assert that market mending is a more ideal response for social enterprise than market reallocation. This paper is a part of a special issue entitled “The Third Sector, Social Enterprises and Public Service Delivery.”
The paper’s abstract reads: “As more non-profits embrace social enterprise, it is important to examine the role social enterprise plays in society. Market failure is the prevailing economic theory explaining non-profits’ existence, and applies to social enterprise. However, market failure theory presents a contradiction: how can social enterprise activities address market failures if they use the market-based strategies that led to that failure? We resolve this contradiction by identifying two responses to market failure: market reallocation and market mending. We examine how these responses align with social enterprise and non-profit conceptions. We discuss implications for strategy, public policy, and research.”
Public Management Review publishes international research on the development of public management, including public policy developments and management of public services.
Kennedy joined the Love School of Business in 2016 after earning a doctorate in organizations and social change from the University of Massachusetts-Boston. Her research focuses on strategic decision making in social enterprises, entrepreneurial community formation, and entrepreneurship education, and has been published in the Journal of Business Venturing, Public Management Review, Journal of Social Entrepreneurship, and Entrepreneurship Education & Pedagogy. She currently serves as Elon’s Faculty Fellow for Leadership Education.