Sustainable scaling of social impact through bricolage within social entrepreneurship: The case of four square Edinburgh

Abstract

This teaching case study is focused on the concept of bricolage – a loose bundle of experimental practices which seek to employ resources more effectively. It analyses how bricolage is often used by social enterprises to scale their social impact sustainably within a landscape of resource constraints. Four Square's Chief Executive Officer, Jane Devine, is currently contemplating how to increase the social impact of her organisation, so that it can deliver greater benefits to a larger number of beneficiaries. The case study examines how some of the actions which she has recently taken, and some which she is contemplating, represent bricolage. The concept is analysed within the context of an Edinburgh-based social enterprise whose purpose is to ‘support people who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless’. Finally, the case also contemplates the actual and potential outcomes of bricolage in terms of scaling Four Square's social impact.

Learning outcomes

This teaching case study offers a launch pad for students to participate in empirically underpinned debates about bricolage.

The case study also empowers students to contemplate how social entrepreneurs adopt bricolage to help scale their social impacts sustainably.

The teaching case study also facilitates student engagement in more generic discussions about innovation and resource management within enterprises.

The case invites students to critically analyse the impacts of bricolage upon the scaling of social impact in social enterprises.

Introduction

This case study is intended to facilitate student exploration of the concept of bricolage, and its role within entrepreneurship. The case centres around a small social enterprise whose CEO adopts a bricolage approach to maximise the effectiveness of its resources and increase its social impact. Specifically, the case probes how being an ‘entrepreneur-bricoleur’ entails adopting an innovative mindset. Furthermore, the case challenges students to explore the constituents of bricolage and its potential outcomes – in particular its benefits to the organisation (and therefore to the organisation's stakeholders).

Within the field of research into social entrepreneurship, previous publications have usually focused on more formal, planned types of innovation (Chaudhuri et al., 2023). Additionally, many previous studies of bricolage in social enterprises have been context-specific (e.g. focusing specifically on social enterprises in developing economies which serve ‘Bottom Of Pyramid’ populations). Whilst highly worthwhile, such studies have limited transferability into other contexts, such as social enterprises addressing homelessness or absolute poverty in developed economies. The aim here is therefore to facilitate a broad understanding of bricolage which is generalisable across different contexts, and which readers and students may then apply to specific organisations and causes which interest them.

The novelty of this article is threefold: At a contextual level, the case study encourages conversations and supports learning on bricolage within management, and more specifically within entrepreneurship, demonstrating the important contribution which it can make to the sustainability and scalability of businesses such as social enterprises. At a practical level, it provides a detailed view of how a contemporary social entrepreneur uses bricolage to orient her day-to-day management decisions to the overarching mission and strategies of her organisation, giving clear examples of individual strategic and operational decisions. At an academic level, it is the first teaching case study to provide applied academic exercises on bricolage for students and teachers of social entrepreneurship, although these exercises are more broadly applicable to other social enterprises.

Understanding bricolage within social entrepreneurship

Bricolage, as understood within the specific context of social entrepreneurship, is ‘the making do with any resources at hand to provide innovative solutions for social needs that traditional organizations fail to address in an adequate way’ (Janssen et al., 2017: 450). It leverages ‘a refusal to be constrained by limitations, and improvisation’ (p. 681) to create social value and stimulate stakeholder participation (Di Domenico et al., 2010). It can therefore be understood as a thrifty, imaginative form of resourcefulness used to help achieve the organisation's social mission – encapsulating approaches such as repurposing or extending the usage of machinery, materials, buildings, money, staff, information or time.

The term ‘bricolage’ was coined by Lévi-Strauss (1967) to describe the process in which existing resources can be transformed into a new entity. It has since been used to explain how entrepreneurs reorient existing resources – such as staff, storage space, income, technical and cultural knowledge (Dacin et al., 2010), and social networks – to address emerging aims (Baker and Nelson, 2005). ‘Entrepreneur-bricoleurs’ (Fisher, 2012) usually depend less upon conceptualising their strategies, and more on experimentation, using and repurposing readily available resources (Amouri et al., 2021), like their own skills and personal networks (Senyard et al., 2009). Bricolage constitutes a problem-solving approach ‘through which alternative ideas and solutions can be generated, evaluated and implemented’ (Bacq et al., 2015: 284).

To entrepreneurs, bricolage is an organic bundle of actions undertaken to wring as much potential as possible from their resources (e.g. Garud and Karnoe, 2003; Magobe et al., 2024; Mateus and Sarkar, 2024; Simba et al., 2021; Steffens et al., 2009; Stinchfield et al., 2013), and to uncover new ways to deal with resource scarcity (Desa, 2007; Linna, 2013) and to adopt an innovation-led mindset (Halme et al., 2012). To social entrepreneurs – whose success is determined not by profit maximisation, but by their ability to deliver social impact (Bacq et al., 2015) – bricolage can enable the identification, evaluation and exploitation of opportunities (Shane and Venkataraman, 2000), and can facilitate the scaling of the enterprise's social impact (Dees, 2008). Therefore, bricolage can not only support social enterprises in delivering positive social change (Gundry et al., 2011), but can help them to increase and expand their social impact. Whilst the relationship between bricolage and social scaling has received surprisingly scant attention within social entrepreneurship literature, a few notable exceptions (e.g. Bacq et al., 2015; Smith and Stevens, 2010; Zahra et al., 2009) have made strong contributions by demonstrating the widespread prevalence of bricolage, and its undeniably value, in this context.

Social enterprises seek to generate societal benefits, and to do this they ‘undertake actions which lead to social innovation’ (Babu et al., 2020, p.16) through collaboration and engagement with other similar organisations, constantly seeking to maximise utilisation of their resources. Despite a lack of consensus in defining social entrepreneurship (Brown and Pattinson, 2025; Galera and Borgaza, 2009), scholars agree that social enterprises have a market-orientation (e.g. Brown and Pattinson, 2024; Liston-Heyes and Liu, 2021; Longoni et al., 2019), prioritise social and/or environmental missions (e.g. Dempsey and Sanders, 2010), adopt business models to achieve this which often leverage grants, tax breaks and donations (Somerville and McElwee, 2011), and are usually entrepreneurially opportunistic (Liu et al., 2015). They differ from commercial ventures by not prioritising profit over other goals (Glasbeek et al., 2024) Social enterprises which adopt bricolage are usually more socially impactful, partly due to the ability of bricolage to underpin and facilitate the scaling of social impact by enabling the organisation to expand or adapt its outputs (Bacq et al., 2015). Social entrepreneurs may seek to scale the ‘breadth impact’ of their organisations, expanding geographically or in the number of beneficiaries of their work. Alternatively, they may seek to scale the ‘depth impact’ of their organisations, improving the quality or comprehensiveness of the product or service which they provide to their target communities (Bacq et al., 2015; Desa and Koch, 2014; Senyard et al., 2014). The novel approaches to scaling sustainably are often geared toward improving the quality and quantity of resources attracted and distributed by the organisation (Gundry et al., 2011).

Early conceptualisations of bricolage in entrepreneurship (e.g. Baker et al., 2003; Weick, 1993) emphasised its improvisational nature and its propensity to produce ‘something from nothing’ (Baker and Nelson, 2005: 329). However, whilst this interpretation has persisted, the concept of ‘innovator-entrepreneurs’ has evolved from depictions of rather hopeful experimenters unpredictable breakthroughs (e.g. Miettinen and Virkkunen, 2005), to more targeted, technical problem-solvers driven by a desire to improve the sustainability of their business models (e.g. Linna, 2013). Bricolage approaches may even be applied to entrepreneurs’ management of strategic staff communication (e.g. Brown et al., 2022; Brown, 2023; Brown et al., 2025) and Human Resources (e.g. Brown, 2017; Brown et al., 2019; Roy et al., 2025), whether in social or commercial enterprises (e.g. Brown, 2025), and to advertising (e.g. Hardcastle et al., 2025). Many social entrepreneurs may be categorised as ‘social bricoleurs’ who use their embeddedness, profile and trustworthiness within local communities, and their highly developed networks of local stakeholders (Shams et al., 2020) to address local concerns – although their inseparability from, and reliance upon, localised resources may constrain their strategic choices (Bacq et al., 2015; Dey et al., 2023; Maiti et al., 2020).

The importance of bricolage to entrepreneurs

Adopting a bricolage approach to business can present numerous benefits to entrepreneurs. It helps to embed innovation, not only within technical aspects of a business such as new product development, but also within the day-to-day operations and management of resources (Guo et al., 2016). This is particularly vital to social entrepreneurs, who invariably must ‘do more with less’ (Brown and Thompson, 2023; Brown et al., 2024) and seek cost-efficient ways to maximise thin resources in an economically sustainable manner (Phillips and Tracey, 2007; Salunke et al., 2013). This in turn means that social enterprises have sufficient agility to balance their societal and economic objectives within a turbulent and unpredictable environment. Furthermore, small innovations enable social enterprises to differentiate themselves from purely commercial competitors, especially those competitors which are significantly larger and/or not location-specific who may therefore not be able to react as quickly to local market demands (Donbesuur et al., 2023).

Social entrepreneurs particularly value bricolage for the immediate control which it gives them over the direction of their enterprises (Musona et al., 2020): In most larger organisations, strategic drift is often either detected or acted upon only sporadically, due to the time required to perform formal analyses of the business environment and to align change-making resources and strategies with their stakeholders – and due to the time required for the organisational learning (Argyris and Schön, 1978) involved in identification of strategic drift – but social entrepreneurs who adopt bricolage are constantly alert to environmental changes and nimble enough to employ small interventions to quickly restore adherence to the organisation's overarching strategy. This is crucial, due to the dual primacy of societal and economic priorities inherent within social enterprises.

Four Square Edinburgh

Jane Devine has been the CEO of Four Square (Scotland) since August 2018. With an academic background in social policy, she has previous leadership experience in the public sector. The charity has around 80 staff members and supports people who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless. Its mission is to ensure everyone has a beautiful home and a place in their community.

The Four Square charitable arm operates four specialist residential units supporting a total of 65 residents at any one time. It also delivers community-based support services helping people deal with issues that may lead to homelessness. The organisation generates commercial revenue through the operation of two social enterprises: a furniture and homeware reuse store and a newer licensed café. In the financial year 2022–2023, the Four Square social enterprises accounted for approximately one-third of the total organisational turnover. In 2022, Four Square moved to significantly larger premises, doubling sales in the reuse store versus pre-COVID and diverting over 400 tonnes of furniture from landfill.

Four Square describes itself on its website as a ‘charity supporting people who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless’ (Four Square, 2025). Each year, it supports over one thousand people who are experiencing homelessness: In 2023/2024, it provided 65 bed spaces for 365 days of the year to people experiencing homelessness, and its Visiting Housing Support service supported 362 people. Its 5-week training and development Springboard Programme provided employability training and supported young people towards education, training and employment, and its EFI charity shop diverted 38,325 items of furniture from landfill. The addition of its Park Café, in Saughton Park, Edinburgh, provides a community hub and additional source of income.

As CEO and Company Secretary, Jane Devine reports to a Board with a capacity of 12 Board members but which currently has eight: A Chair, Vice-Chair, five Directors, and a Chair of the Finance Committee. It is a registered charity, of which the Edinburgh Furniture Initiative (EFI) is one of its social enterprises. In 2023/2024, Four Square achieved an income of £4 m, its major income sources being City of Edinburgh Council contracts, grant income, other funding, and enterprise income from its social enterprises (e.g. EFI, which had an income of £1.4 m). Four Square operates within a highly regulated environment which necessitates compliance with rules laid down by the Care Inspectorate, the Scottish Social Services Council, and the Health & Safety Executive. For EFI, it has gained Revolve accreditation – Scotland's national reuse quality standard issued by Zero Waste Scotland – which signifies that EFI is highly reputable and operates to extremely high standards of quality, safety and customer experience. Four Square is also registered for waste disposal by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA).

CEO Jane Devine is a highly experienced leader and public servant, having been Director of Social Work Scotland (the professional leadership body for social workers in Scotland), and having worked for Audit Scotland, the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, and the Scottish Parliament. Her extensive experience within the public and charity sectors is underpinned by graduate and postgraduate qualifications in Politics & Geography, Scottish Politics & Sociology, and the Management & Leadership of Public Service (Four Square, 2025). In short, her knowledge, skills, experience and network are pivotal to the sustained success of Four Square.

Organisation background

In 1982, an organisation was founded to promote the social welfare of individuals experiencing homelessness in Edinburgh. It arose from the recognition that coordination was required across the various agencies working towards the same goal. In the early 2000s, the charity was renamed Four Square, and the Edinburgh Furniture Initiative was launched. This social enterprise was established to generate income by contracting with housing associations to provide affordable furniture and by selling reused items to the public. Four Square tackles homelessness in the city by providing long-term support to its service users through counselling, work opportunities and safe accommodation. Recognising that homelessness often stems from complex and interconnected issues, the charity supports people in addressing these challenges at their own pace. In 2023–2024, they assisted 120 individuals at their accommodation, which includes a women's refuge and a residential unit for young people aged 16 to 25. In 2023, Four Square seized an opportunity to take over a local café, transforming it into a social enterprise. The income generated by the café now supports the charity's work.

The Edinburgh Furniture Initiative collects donated furniture and homeware from both the public and businesses such as hotels and removal companies. They operate a retail outlet where the stock is then checked, displayed and sold. Homeware for sale includes kitchen items such as crockery but also electrical and decorative items. One of the biggest generators of revenue is sofas. To maintain their REVOLVE accreditation for second-hand stores in Scotland, they must maintain quality standards on the items they choose to resell, providing confidence to the end user. For example, upholstered items must have fire labels. Regarding pricing, their ethos is that you should be able to purchase a comfortable chair, a table and a bed for under £500. Their reuse store is one of the largest in Scotland and it is used by a wide range of demographics, from students and young families to those passionate about sustainable consumers and vintage lovers.

Maximising social impact from Four Square's resources

Since joining Four Square in 2018, CEO Jane Devine has sought to maximise the effectiveness of Four Square's resources while operating

‘services that run 24/7, a shop and a café’.

She explains that she acquired a lease on a park café from the council, as she believed that

‘it would be a nice highlight for us as a charity to say ‘this is what we do’ and to link it to our furniture shop down the road. We felt that it fitted in because the answer to homelessness is not just a house – people need a community to be in’.

Jane operates this recently acquired resource at a marginal profit to derive greater benefits – to drive public awareness of the organisation, thereby increasing donations, and to increase the depth of its social impact from ‘tackling homelessness’ to ‘tackling homelessness and alienation from the community’. Jane explains further:

‘A lot of the people who we support, who are homeless, get employment through it…There is a group which has adapted bikes for young disabled people who meet there. The Dementia Choir meet there. There's ‘Coffee With A Cop’ every Tuesday, when you can speak to a Community Police Officer…’

Jane's approach may be interpreted as a form of bricolage, adopted to scale Four Square's social impact. This is because she has reevaluated an existing resource with a view to using it for an additional purpose. Naturally, resource maximisation is not always interpreted as bricolage – a farmer who opens a farm shop may not necessarily be considered a bricoleur, but merely to be extending their product/service line, or repositioning the business. However, here we see Jane reutilising an existing resource nimbly and at minimal additional costs (as opposed to the lengthy planning and significant budget which the farmer would need to launch a shop). Furthermore, she is using this approach to differentiate her organisation from commercial competitors and, more significantly, to weave together the commercial and social strands of Four Square's mission – achieving not just an additional income stream, but also an additional way of serving the community and generating social impact.

The resources are already deployed for numerous purposes:

‘we’ve got accommodation services for young people who are homeless, we deliver a domestic abuse service, we’ve got a warehouse with a van team who are picking up furniture, we’ve got a shop…’

And Jane is keen to deploy her resources even more efficiently to deliver a greater benefit to yet more beneficiaries.

Two new opportunities

Four Square has two exciting opportunities, not only to deliver upon its mission, but to extend it. These adhere to the principles of sustainability because, as Jane explains,

‘we’ve adopted the framework of Doughnut Economics – Kate Raworth's theory that people, planet and places are your three main pillars…I want to be a sustainable organisation’.

Opportunity 1 is a potential deal with the local council in which Four Square would uplift 30 van-loads of house contents from end-of-tenancy dwellings. Jane provides the outline:

‘We would collect everything from inside the house. The council can means-test the payments. We’ll collect everything, put it on our vans, drive it to the council's household recycling centre, sit on the weighbridge, take out all the waste that we can’t sell so the council dispose of that for free, and then they have a tonnage for what has been reused. That gives them their KPIs [Key Performance Indicators] and, through means testing, means they can increase the money they make from uplifts, but it means they don’t have to start splitting up the waste that they bring back – we’ll do that for them. We’ll be able to sell between 17% and 25% of what we collect’.

Jane's strategy would redeploy existing (and some expanded) resources – staff, vehicles, expertise, local networks – to increase the social enterprise's furniture sales stock, and therefore its income and the money available to pursue its social impact mission. Simultaneously, it would help the council to reduce furniture and household waste, and to embed metrics for measuring progress against its recycling targets. Customers would also benefit from a greater availability of quality affordable products. This initiative is readily interpretable as bricolage because several different factors are occurring simultaneously: Jane is reaching out to other non-commercial organisations to engage them in a collaborative, value co-creating exercise; she is weaving together the economic and social strands of Four Square's impact mission; she is engaging and repurposing existing resources (albeit with the addition of some new ones) to achieve those ends; she is responding to an external opportunity for growth.

Opportunity 2 is another potential deal with the council, this time for new premises when the lease on Four Square's current location expires. Jane discusses the background context:

‘There are loads of social enterprises in Edinburgh on precarious leases, who are moving multiple times, often to quite unsuitable premises which they have to renovate, which messes with their customer base and profile’.

Clearly Jane is thinking not only about the needs of Four Square, but of other local social enterprises, in managing a vital resource – their trading premises. She explains how a request to the council brought a counter-proposal:

‘I asked the council if there are any buildings which we can have, and they offered us a large, 9-acre brownfield site. For us on our own, it's no use – it's too big for us and tucked behind other buildings. But I thought, ‘well, maybe if it's not just us, then it would work’. Now…I have an agreement in principle with the council…costings, architect's drawings, and a plan to create a ‘Reuse Shopping Village’, which would sell clothes, bikes, kids’ stuff, surplus food. It would have a ‘Remakery Workshop’ where people would learn the skills to repair instead of relying on consumerism to fuel our donations, and a café, an entertainment space and an allotment’.

By drawing upon a valuable resource – her local network of social entrepreneurs – Jane proposes a strategy which will place Four Square and other social enterprises on a more commercially sustainable footing, co-creating value (Shams, 2016; Shams and Kaufmann, 2016) for a range of stakeholders, such as customers, the council, the local community, and the target population of people who experience homelessness. Therefore, Four Square's social impact would be broadened (through the quality of its services) and deepened (through the quantity of service recipients). Furthermore, the strategy would increase the breadth and depth of Four Square's environmental impact by reducing waste, encouraging recycling, and upskilling local people to reduce unnecessary consumption.

Summary

Jane is leading Four Square towards two exciting strategic opportunities, each of which has the potential to significantly increase the breadth and depth of Four Square's social impact. The opportunities appear to require, and be predicated upon, a bricolage approach, and therefore will demand certain resources to be reoriented to capitalise upon the situation. Each opportunity also has exciting potential to improve the sustainability of Four Square's operations, speaking directly to its core vision by addressing social, environmental and commercial needs. The case is useful in demonstrating how bricolage can inform strategic entrepreneurship and provide a framework within which social enterprises can develop and expand. It advances our understanding of ‘bricoleurs’, and the ways in which their mindset enables them to be nimble and innovative in their leadership of organisations which are almost inevitably resource-constrained and operate within dynamic, competitive environments.

Questions

1. To what extent can Jane's strategising be considered bricolage, or an outcome of a bricolage approach, and why?

2. Would bricolage be a suitable strategy for entrepreneurs who lead purely commercial (i.e., ‘for-profit’) enterprises, and why?

3. What are the potential advantages and disadvantages (or benefits and risks) of a social entrepreneur like Jane adopting bricolage as a strategic mindset?

4. How might the use of bricolage help achieve a balance between the scalability of impact depth and impact breadth within a social enterprise?

5. How can each of the two strategic opportunities described above contribute to the central vision and mission of Four Square?

6. How might successfully pursuing the two opportunities add breadth and depth to Four Square's social impact and represent a sustainability gain?

This case was made possible through the generous cooperation of Jane Devine of Four Square Edinburgh. The case is intended as a basis for class discussion rather than to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of management situations.