To Control or Not Control: A Coordination Perspective to Scaling

Abstract

The question of how social initiatives can effectively scale their impact to reach individuals and communities that benefit from their innovations has received increasing attention over the past few years. A number of scholars adopt a strategic perspective and investigate the mechanisms to scale social organizations (Bradach, 2003; Oster, 1996), while others argue that scaling organizations is not necessarily sufficient to scale impact (Uvin, 1995; Wei-Skillern and Anderson, 2003). The latter group of authors argues that scale is not a particularly good proxy for the effectiveness of the programs (Frumkin, 2007), and that becoming large is only one of the many other possible ways of expanding impact in terms of the number of beneficiaries served (Edwards and Hulme, 1992; Uvin et al., 2000). These authors emphasize that instead of focusing on growing organizations, we need to turn attention to more effective and inclusive ways to address social problems.