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The emerging phenomenon in social finance known as impact investing is the focus of Tom Vanderbroek‘s recently defended dissertation, “Organizational Challenges of Impact Investing: An Ethnographic Study and a Theoretical Exploration.”

The author identifies impact investment as a contemporary social-finance phenomenon that could stand to inform us how private capital is being mobilized to address some of the most difficult societal/environmental challenges. The dissertation is based on a theoretical/philosophical perspective and provides an in-depth empirical investigation through ethnography, reflecting the current state of understanding of the phenomenon in the literature. As impact investing essentially combines both a for-profit and social objective at its core, an appropriate theoretical lens is the hybrid-organization perspective.

The IESE Library has played its own part in Vanderbroek’s dissertation thanks to the access it has granted him to an extensive collection of articles and books. Congratulations to the new Ph.D. and we wish him a lot of success!