Author ORCID Identifier

0000-0003-1307-2305

Date of Award

8-31-2026

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Management (DMgt)

Department

Business Administration

First Advisor

Benyamin Lichtenstein

Second Advisor

Pacey Foster

Third Advisor

Dante Di Gregorio

Abstract

This dissertation examines how a social enterprise creates social value and, through the same intervention, erodes it in the communities it serves. Research on social entrepreneurship has theorized value largely from the organizational viewpoint, measured it at a single point in time, and rested on an unexamined aggregation assumption: that gains delivered to individual households sum into well-being at the level of the community. This study holds that assumption up to community-level, participant-centered evidence. Through three qualitative studies of a participatory housing model implemented by a social enterprise in two informal settlements in Querétaro, México, it analyzes social value creation across three levels: the organization, the families that received and did not receive a home, and the community that contains both. The two settlements share organizational and geographic context but differ in time elapsed since housing delivery, approximately one year and three years, giving the design a quasi-longitudinal logic. The analysis draws on 46 interviews with beneficiary and non-beneficiary families, interviews with organizational members, organizational documents, and six months of field observations, analyzed through reflexive thematic analysis and the Community Capitals Framework. The studies meet on a single finding: at every level, the value the organization creates exceeds the value it can see, and what they cannot see is precisely the relational and political value it names as its deepest purpose. The organization articulates a rich multi-capital mission but can only show evidence on the built capital it delivers. Housing generates durable household gains that do not aggregate upward or to the community at large; delivering homes to some families and not to others produced a social fracture along the beneficiary boundary, present at one year and hardened into community norm by three. Built, cultural, and human capital rose while social and political capital fell through the same intervention over the same period, so the community's trajectory was not a single spiral but a divergence. The dissertation contributes a multi-level, community-anchored account of social value, specifies the mechanisms through which household gains fail to aggregate, and identifies spiritual capital as a dimension of community life the framework had not named.

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