Toward a Sustainable Community-based Enterprise: Organizational Architecture and Performance

Abstract

Responding to the lack of understanding of community-based enterprise (CBE), this paper aims to pursue a sustainable CBE-model by identifying the organizational architecture and performance of existing CBEs, as well as finding out aspects that influence the CBEs’ success. A case-survey of 34 cases is conducted to bridge the gap between the individuality of case-study reports and a better generalization of knowledge. Ten hypotheses are developed and tested using Partial Least Square and Ordered Logistic Regression methods. Descriptive statistics show that the contextual situation, organizational architecture, and performance of CBEs are far from uniform. The CBEs’ performance is sustainable since generally they indeed bring economic, social, as well as environmental improvements. Nevertheless, the sustainability of organizational architecture is rather fragile since almost all CBEs’ activities are not free from outsiders’ intervention and in many cases ‘smaller group of individuals on behalf of the people’ still becomes the driver of CBEs.