Integrating cross-sector partnerships with social enterprise scaling

Catching up on some social enterprise scaling reading, and I really enjoyed a recent article by Wang (2025) in Voluntas titled: Building Cross-Sector Collaboration and Managing Institutional Tensions in Social Enterprise Organisations. The title immediately drew me in as I’ve been recently further working and reflecting on the purpose, impact and challenges of collaborations in scaling social enterprises.

To give a bit of background and context into Wangs research, firstly, it is based in South Eastern United States, so there is of course a geographical contextual difference from Ireland but I believe there is still much that can be gleaned from it.

Without a doubt, the most complex aspect of scaling a social enterprise is managing the competing demands that are inherent in hybrid organisations. Smith et al. (2013) set out four types of tensions that exist in hybrid organisations:

1. Performing tensions: divergent metrics for success across social and commercial objectives

2. Organising tensions: conflicting internal dynamics and operational demands

3. Belonging tensions: divergent identities and stakeholder expectations

4. Learning tensions: competing priorities around growth, scale, and change

In response to these tensions, Wang sets out 3 different types of partnerships that can be deployed to attempt to manage these tensions.

Community Engagement Partnerships: These types of partnerships help social enterprises understand local needs, establish credibility, and build relationships that ensure their offerings align with community priorities. These partnerships address performing, belonging, and learning tensions by grounding the organisation in its local social context.

Resource Acquisition Partnerships: These focus on securing funding, implementing programmes, and accessing resources to sustain operations. Wang demonstrates that these partnerships help manage performing, organising, and learning tensions by providing the financial and human capital necessary for dual-mission sustainability.

Dual-Value Partnerships: These partnerships intentionally advance both social and business goals through integrated collaboration. Wang argues these represent the most sophisticated form of cross-sector engagement, capable of addressing all types of institutional tensions simultaneously.

Using these categorisations of partnerships resonated with me based on my own research. Wang's performing tensions connect directly to a challenge I identified: maintaining commitment to both social and commercial goals during scaling. My findings show that as social enterprises scale, the pressure to prove financial sustainability often creates imbalanced metrics that partnerships cannot fix on their own. Wang found that business SEs struggle to measure social impact while nonprofit SEs struggle to separate social and commercial metrics. Wang also found that social enterprises experience belonging tensions during scaling. Business-focused social enterprises face pressure to become nonprofits, while nonprofit social enterprises experience confusion about their identity as social enterprises. My research shows this becomes more acute during scaling when organisations must communicate their value to increasingly diverse stakeholders.

Furthermore, Wang's organising tensions align with my research on resource mobilisation and operational capacity during scaling. My data reveals something additional: these tensions change over time as organisations grow. Early organising tensions around workforce and revenue models evolve into more complex governance and structural challenges in later scaling phases. Wang's partnership typology shows how external relationships can support this evolution, but my research suggests different partnership types work better at different scaling stages.

Finally, learning tensions represent the strongest connection between our work. Wang identifies challenges around scaling and balancing short-term versus long-term goals. My research extends this by showing that the tensions social enterprises face look different across scaling strategies. Organisations pursuing replication face tensions around standardisation versus localisation, while those pursuing diversification face tensions between maintaining core strengths and developing new capabilities. Wang's dual-value partnerships may be particularly important for these organisations, but my data suggests they are also the hardest to sustain during rapid growth.

So what does this mean for scaling social enterprises:

1. Scaling is all about being adaptive. Social enterprises need to be cognisant of the fact that partnerships will change as they scale. The strategies deployed for managing partnerships in early-stage development may no longer be fit for purpose as the social enterprise moves into a balancing of short-term requirements and longer-term development.

2. There is value in each type of partnership; social enterprises need to ensure they are matching the type of partnership with their current need. Community engagement partnerships establish legitimacy foundations, resource acquisition partnerships enable growth spurts, and dual-value partnerships sustain mature impact at scale.

3. Be proactive about building partnerships; they take a long time to become effective! Investing in relationship building and management will pay dividends to the social enterprise as it scales.

Understanding how partnerships can support the scaling of social enterprises is imperative. As we all know, resources and capacity are very often stretched in social enterprises, and partnerships take time, so ensuring a social enterprise is investing in the right ones is crucial!