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NetprosAfrica Online Webinar:

8th April 2026 1.30pm GMT

Title
Harambee! A Triadic Perspective on Social Impact Organisations , Evaluators, and Target Beneficiaries in Kenya with Anna Kim from McGill University.

Speakers

Anna Kim, McGill University, Canada.

Tapiwa Seremani, IESEG.

Simeon Odek, KCA University, Kenya.

Jackson Obare, University of Nairobi.

Online

Teams link will be shared with registered participants.

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Join us for webinar by Network for Practice and Process Management Studies Drawing on African Empirical Settings (www.netprosafrica.org) with Anna Kim from McGill University.

Please in advance and your questions and comments! We are looking to enable sophisticated understandings, to stimulate dialogue, to allow for African points of view to be articulated and to shape future directions for research. Therefore, we will not be following traditional paper presentation formats and reading the article in advance is essential.

We have invited (IESEG) to introduce the study of legitimacy and with practice-based methods. Our discussants are PhD scholar , Simeon Odek from KCA University in Kenya and Jackson Obare from the University of Nairobi.

The session is intended to last 1 hour and 30 minutes with timings as follows:

20 min- Introduction: legitimacy

20 min- Harambee! A Triadic Perspective on Social Impact: Organizations, Evaluators, and Target Beneficiaries in Kenya (Anna Kim)

20 min- Discussant questions

20 min- Open discussion

10 min- Reflection

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Anna Kim is a William Dawson Scholar and Associate Professor in Management for Sustainability at the Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University. Her research explores organizing for sustainability through the lens of time–space, encompassing themes such as social entrepreneurship, Indigenous entrepreneurship, and linguistic inclusiveness in organizations. The research contexts of her ethnographic and qualitative studies include Fairtrade-certified tea and coffee producer organizations in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Nepal, start-ups in post-industrial Detroit, Indigenous enterprises on Turtle Island, digital innovation in Kenya, multilingualism in Kazakhstan, as well as Fair Trade social enterprises in Canada and the UK. Her research has been published in top-tier management journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, and Organization Science. Anna received her Ph.D. in management studies from the University of Cambridge. ()

Harambee! A Triadic Perspective on Social Impact: Organizations, Evaluators, and Target Beneficiaries in Kenya

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Abstract:

Organizations often claim that their actions benefit others, for example in social impact initiatives, eliciting positive legitimacy evaluations from a broad range of audiences even though such initiatives may produce limited or even harmful effects on target beneficiaries. While scholars have begun to examine relational dynamics between organizations and evaluators who render judgments about organizational legitimacy, target beneficiaries have been typically considered as the passive recipients of positive or negative impacts of organizational actions.

Drawing on qualitative data from a corporate social responsibility project in Kenya, this study reveals a triadic relationship (organization–evaluators–target beneficiaries) that establishes organizational legitimacy in the eyes of evaluators while generating substantive benefits for target beneficiaries. Far from being passive, target beneficiaries actively participated in the organizational legitimation process by corroborating, in their communications with evaluators, the organization’s social impact claims. This corroboration provided leverage for the target beneficiaries to negotiate organizational support in order for them to redirect off-the-shelf practices toward contextualized practices that generated substantive benefits to themselves. Going beyond the organization–evaluator dyad, the study contributes a triadic perspective on social impact and reveals how target beneficiaries’ participation can reshape the processes and outcomes of social impact creation.