Social entrepreneurship and the challenge of collaborative governance of civic events: Brazil, Korea, and the United States

Abstract

Civic events are held in cities around the world. These activities add substantial value to the host community, but also pose significant management challenges, due to the substantial collaboration required. These events represent a unique form of organization since they require the collaboration of organizations from all sectors. However, they also have varying levels of regime formality and a reliance on voluntary action to achieve economic and social capital goals similar to hybrid organizations found in the social entrepreneurship literature. We use comparative case analysis of Brazil, Korea, and the U.S., to test the degree to which these events fit with existing models of collaborative governance and social entrepreneurship. We find a good fit, but also identify several factors of these events that are underdeveloped by or omitted from the models.