Israr Qureshi is Professor of Social Entrepreneurship and ICT for Development at the Australian National University, Research School of Management. He is currently involved in multiple research projects that investigate various aspects of social value creation through social entrepreneurship and digital social innovation. Israr is currently a member of the Civil Society Group of Australian Sustainable Finance Initiative (ASFI), empowered to create a roadmap for a sustainable and resilient economy that prioritises human well-being, social equity, and protection of the environment. He is also an expert observer on Technical Working Group-4 of ASFI that has been entrusted with identifying challenges and solutions to the inclusive financial needs of urban, regional, and rural communities. Israr is Associate Editor at Information Systems Journal and Business and Society, and he will start his Associate Editor tenure at MIS Quarterly from January 1, 2021.

Topic: Addressing Grand Challenges through Social Entrepreneurship and Social Intermediation Research

Poverty, socio-economic inequality, and climate change are grand challenges of our time. Organizations collectively referred to as social enterprises have begun efforts to address some of these issues through the process of social intermediation. Social enterprises are driven primarily by social goals, but seek to accomplish such goals in a manner that is, at least in part, financially self-sustaining rather than relying exclusively upon ongoing donations or government grants. Thus, the objectives of social intermediaries are to engage in a set of activities that will allow base-of-the pyramid (BOP) producers or consumers to reduce problems of adverse selection and moral hazard that currently plague transactional arrangements, and to redistribute the resulting economic rents in a more equitable manner.

In pursuing their goals, social intermediaries must decide specifically the scope of their involvement in orchestrating trade between buyers and sellers. Specifically, they must decide the extent to which they will undertake the transaction functions of search, negotiation, monitoring, and enforcement internally using a hierarchical arrangement versus requiring buyers and sellers to transact directly in the market. Management and organization studies scholars have only recently embarked on investigation related to questions such as (1) how do organizations currently seeking to alleviate poverty by connecting BOP markets with more developed markets elect to structure their activities; and (2) what additions or modifications are required to existing main steam economic/ management theories such intermediation theory, transaction cost economics, and agency theory to adequately explain and predict structuring decisions made by social intermediaries?