In the Global North, where social entrepreneurs and their stakeholders agree that social enterprise needs to do more for stakeholders than traditional business, social entrepreneurs balancing financial and pro-social goals seek to avoid mission drift by being responsive to their stakeholders. In many areas of the Global South, despite the work of NGOs and foreign aid, social problems remain persistent and pervasive, so social entrepreneurs face vastly different stakeholder demands. Our qualitative study of 36 social entrepreneurs in Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda builds on behavioral theory to understand how social entrepreneurs balance pro-social and financial goals in this context. We find that they experience a mismatch between their social impact aspirations and the expectations of stakeholders, which leads to concerns of Impact Drift, which we define as the decoupling of pro-social actions from enduring social impact outcomes. Concerns of impact drift prompt a norm-breaking approach to social impact, involving orchestrating novel coalitions of stakeholders and employing heuristics to limit their focus and reassure them about their approach.

在北半球国家，社会企业家及其利益相关者一致认为，社会企业需要比传统企业为利益相关者做更多的事情，平衡财务和亲社会目标的社会企业家寻求通过对利益相关者做出回应来避免使命偏离。在南半球的许多地区，尽管非政府组织和外国援助做出了努力，但社会问题仍然持续存在和普遍存在，因此社会企业家面临着截然不同的利益相关者需求。我们基于行为理论对肯尼亚、乌干达和卢旺达的 36 名社会企业家进行定性研究，以了解社会企业家如何在此背景下平衡亲社会目标和财务目标。我们发现他们的社会影响力愿望与利益相关者的期望不匹配，这导致了对影响力漂移的担忧，我们将其定义为亲社会行动与持久社会影响结果的脱钩。对影响力漂移的担忧促使人们对社会影响采取打破常规的方法，包括精心策划新的利益相关者联盟，并采用启发式方法来限制他们的注意力并让他们对自己的方法放心。