The Fork in the Road for Social Enterprises: Leveraging Moral Imagination for Long-Term Stakeholder Support

Social enterprises (SEs) that receive early stakeholder support for their dual economic/social missions risk losing moral legitimacy when stakeholders assess them for social impact and find it lacking. We present a process model that begins at the “fork in the road” of stakeholder assessment and shows that when SEs continue to focus on primary stakeholders at the expense of secondary stakeholders impacted by the firm, they risk losing moral...