The More the Better vs. Less is More: Strategic Alliances, Bricolage and Social Performance in Social Enterprises

Social enterprises (SEs) seek effective resource mobilization strategies that can translate resources into improved performance, thereby achieving their social missions. Strategic alliances offer SEs access to various resources, and bricolage helps SEs mobilize the assets at hand by ‘making do with everything available’. However, the dynamics between the two strategies and their impact on the SEs’ performance remain underexplored. Drawing upon a resource-based view through an input-process-output lens and integrating resource dependence theory, this study explores the mechanism of strategic alliances, bricolage, and social impact scaling and investigates the role of entrepreneurial orientation within it. Using evidence drawn from a survey of 278 Chinese social firms, this research views strategic alliances and bricolage as an effective ‘strategic bundle’ for improving SEs’ social performance and sheds new light on the bricolage-mediated resource management mechanism within SEs. We suggest that social entrepreneurs practice alliance-specific bricolage strategies to convert resources into superior social performance.