Scaling Community Enterprises: Multilevel Sustainability Strategies Across Local and Global Contexts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This symposium explores how community enterprises (CEs) navigate the complex challenges of scaling their operations while maintaining their core values and community-oriented missions, drawing on institutional and entrepreneurship theory. As ecological and social challenges intensify, CEs—hybrid business organizations collectively founded, owned, and controlled by local communities—are emerging as vital actors in societal transformations towards sustainability. While their impact is evident, with, for instance, over 11,500 renewable energy communities across Europe mobilizing millions of citizens, scaling these initiatives can endanger core values through mission drift and corporate-type practices. Through four empirical papers, this symposium examines how CEs can advance their impact on sustainability challenges while preserving their foundational social purpose. The papers investigate: (1) how CEs navigate institutional complexity and competing logics during scaling processes, drawing insights from an ethnographic study of a Spanish energy cooperative; (2) how community characteristics at the municipal level influence the emergence and replication of Dutch sustainability CEs, focusing on energy, circular economy and regenerative agriculture; (3) how meta-organizations enable sustainable scaling through rhizomatic coordination processes in the Dutch energy sector; and (4) how macro-level institutional, economic, and social factors shape the emergence and scalability of social innovations in the energy sector across 29 European countries. The symposium serves dual purposes: providing a developmental platform for emerging scholarship with feedback from senior academics, and creating a forum for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to connect and share insights on scaling CEs. These discussions will advance organizational theory by illuminating the interplay between institutional complexity, community dynamics, and scaling processes in hybrid organizations. Navigating Institutional Complexity in Scaling: An Ethnographic Study of an Energy Cooperative Author: Daniel Aguilar Vinas; Rotterdam School of Management Author: Thomas Bauwens; Rotterdam School of Management Scaling-Across, Not Alike: Regional Variations in Sustainability Community Enterprises Replication Author: Matthijs Benjamin Punt; Utrecht University A Field of Wildflowers Bloom: Rhizomatic Meta-organizing and Impact Scaling of Hybrid Organizations Author: Daniel Petrovics; Rotterdam School of Management Author: Taneli Vaskelainen; University of Helsinki Author: Thomas Bauwens; Rotterdam School of Management Macro-Level Drivers of Social Innovation for Sustainability: A Longitudinal Multilevel Analysis Author: Jason Roncancio; Erasmus University Rotterdam Author: Sam de Ploeg; Rotterdam School of Management Author: Thomas Bauwens; Rotterdam School of Management
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.020 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".