Forging Ahead or Grasping at Straws? The Affects and Outcomes of Social Enterprise Legal Structure Change

Cases of legal structure change within social enterprises were examined using case study and qualitative comparative analyses to understand how legal structure change altered core business model components and subsequent outcomes for survival. The article identifies motivations for legal structure change (opportunity, weakness and threat), tracks changes made to business model components (value proposition, value creation and value capture), and examines post-change survival. Findings indicate that the business model component altered depends on the motivation for legal structure change and that survival favours enterprises that build value creation and value capture components first, while others enter a downward spiral from which it is difficult to recover.