Sustainability! Over My Dead Body? - Bridging Institutional Voids through a Responsible Innovation
Year: 2020
Type: preprint
Abstract: Grand Challenges (GC) in the societal space have gathered a lot of attention. Extant research has highlighted the failure of several top-down innovations in addressing GCs, mainly due to the lack of contextual understanding. In this paper, we focus on the Indian Hindu funerary practices and how a grassroots-responsible innovation is bringing about change. Our enquiries reveal that although formal, environmentally sustainable crematoria are available, often members of the marginalized communities do not avail of them, due to the presence of ‘complementary institutional voids’. These voids arise at the interface of the formal and informal institutions; due to the complex interplay of inter-community and intra-community dynamics, which have not been explored in extant literature. Our findings revealed that through its grassroots-responsible innovation and their consumer responsibilization practices, one of the social enterprises aiming to promote environmentally sustainable cremation practices succeeded in developing a wood-based cremation system for the marginalized sections, and afforded them a regained sense of identity.
Source: SSRN Electronic Journal
Institution: Indian Institute of Management Calcutta
Language: English
Subfield: Business and International Management
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3204073376