Search

We use two sequential randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to study the impact of the first two editions of a 12-day intensive training program that cost about 12,000 euros (approx. $14,878) per participant to encourage youth to become leaders in social entrepreneurship. The first edition of the program showed no robust treatment effects. The program was adjusted to reduce leadership training and increase “hard skills” entrepreneurship training. The second edition of the program had treatment effects on entrepreneurial activities and the creation of a new venture during the program, as well as subsequent start-up activity. In both RCTs, participants who had made more entrepreneurial progress before the start of the program made more progress afterward, irre-spective of treatment. Those with the highest pretreatment expectations made the least progress, irrespective of treatment. Training people to learn entrepreneurship seems to be difficult and costly, but repeated field experiments will increase our knowledge of the impact of entrepreneurship training.

This article focuses on changes in leadership’s discourse about the “triple bottom line” in Ben & Jerry’s ice cream from its founding days through to its acquisition by and integration into Unilever. For this study, we analyzed CEO claims about “who we are” from their letters in annual reports (what we label projected identity). A sample of employees (both long-service and relative newcomers) were interviewed about their perceptions of Ben & Jerry’s over the 30 years covered. Findings reveal that successive CEOs stressed different “logics” about the business and what would make it successful over the years with the founders emphasizing a strong linkage between the economic, product, and social components of the company’s triple bottom line and their next three successors decoupling these components and pushing, each in different ways, for stronger financial returns. As a result, organization members were “whipsawed” between their CEOs’ different logics and identity claims. The CEO letters exhibit a progression over time from a more normative to utilitarian tone familiar in the organizational identity literature. The messaging shifts, however, when a fifth CEO takes charge and reintegrates the firm’s triple bottom line. Thus, the firm’s projected identity evolved in a U pattern starting with an integrated triple bottom line logic, shifting to a more linear logic where the economic mission dominates, and then reintegration where multiple bottom lines are embraced once again. Here, we explore both the strategic (external) and personal (internal) challenges informing the different CEOs’ messages over years, the whipsaw effect on staff, and the longer term evolution of projected identity in the company and reemergence of its integrated triple bottom line. This study contributes to the corporate social responsibility and organization identity literatures by documenting how CEOs (and their company) must struggle with maintaining an integrated triple bottom line in the context of commercial challenges and major changes involved in mergers and acquisitions. It also speaks to the practical matters of keeping normative traditions alive amid competing pressures for change.