Partners for Good: How Business and NGOs Engage the Commercial–Social Paradox
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Businesses and NGOs are collaborating more frequently to address social issues with commercial solutions, yet not all collaborations work well. We wanted to know why some collaborations struggle where others succeed. We studied five projects in India in which businesses bought goods and services from NGOs that employed disadvantaged people. Two of these five projects met the expectations of both parties, whereas the other three did not. By drawing on the paradox literature, we argue that the project’s success indicates that the business and NGO engaged the commercial-social paradox. We found that in the projects that worked well, the two parties held fluid categories, i.e. they saw differences between business and NGO as contextual and aimed to find creative workarounds to emergent problems. In the projects that did not work well, businesses and NGOs imposed categorical imperatives, i.e. they saw sharp differences that they intensified by imposing standardized and familiar solutions on their partner. We contribute to the literature on paradox to show how cognition and action create generative or limited outcomes. We also weigh in on the ontological foundations of paradox, arguing that actors that assume that paradoxes are a social construction are more likely to engage paradoxes than actors that assume paradoxes are a social reality.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it