The durability of social mission in for-profit incumbents' poverty-penalty initiatives

Details

Supervisors

Mossay, Emmanuel

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences de gestion, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

enLarge for-profit firms occasionally build offers that reduce the poverty penalty, the extra cost low-income households bear to participate in ordinary markets. Such an offer is small beside the core business and rests on a social logic peripheral to it, and the literature expects protection to keep it alive: a separate budget, processes held off the firm's ordinary systems. This thesis asks how incumbents handle such an offer as it scales compared with its experimentation phase, and what that scaling implies for the durability of its social mission and its terms. The study rests on eight semi-structured interviews across three case ecosystems in two Western European welfare states: a household-appliance rental scheme for low-income families, a bank-initiated coalition against digital exclusion, and corporate offers brokered by a cross-sector intermediary in mobility, telecommunications and household electrical safety. The interviews were coded in the informants' own terms, then read against the hybridity and boundary-work literatures. Scaling is described everywhere as de-exceptionalisation, or becoming ordinary: the protections of the pilot phase are built to be exited, including funding, legal form, processes and staff. What re-enters the firm is commercial: pricing, product, delivery, billing. What does not re-enter is social: measuring who qualifies, carrying the risk that a household cannot pay, and accompanying it. Those three functions settle on rails that already exist outside the firm, public eligibility metrics, guarantee funds and welfare actors, and it is that externalisation that keeps the terms from being narrowed by a quiet commercial decision. The same arrangement sets the offer's ceiling, since growth is handed to those partners' capacity and carries risks of imbalanced metrics between logics. For theory, the study divides configurational boundary work's coalescing mode into inward and outward coalescing and conceptualises institutionalized buffering. Practically, it suggests planning the end of the exception instead of defending it, treating the partners who carry the social side as leverage with a known ceiling, and measuring the household side often enough for a stale criterion to be noticed.