Organizational Learning and Marketing Capability Development: A Study of Charity Retailing Operation of British Social Enterprises.

Abstract

Social enterprise is a hybrid form of profit- and social benefit-seeking organization whereby traditional nonprofit organizations pursue both their social mission and business opportunities. To embrace this new strategic direction shift, the nonprofit organizations need to develop new competences that will enable them to respond to the changes in the business model. The article investigates the learning mechanisms through which social enterprises develop a marketing capability to deploy their resources in the marketplace as the drivers of competitive advantage in their commercial practice. We study eight cases of UK-based charity retailers, in order to address the role of knowledge accumulation, articulation and codification process in the evolution of marketing capability development. We identify, amongst other things that the critical process of organizational learning for social enterprise is to transfer the experience into organization specific knowledge under the social aspects of constraints.