Public trust in Chinese elder-care social enterprises: common awareness and diverse perspectives from key stakeholders

Chinese elder-care social enterprises (SEs), emerging hybrid organizations that address welfare problems in elder care through business activities, face ambiguity as the institutionalization of the SE sector is growing rapidly. Few studies have focused on changes in public behavior and trust in this emerging organizational form. The purpose of this research is to identify public trust in Chinese elder-care SEs through the theoretical lens of stakeholder trust. A qualitative methodology was adopted in this study. Common awareness and diverse perspectives among stakeholders were identified by conducting 17 semi-interviews and 3 participatory observations on 5 key stakeholder groups of Chinese elder-care SE, followed by a thematic analysis. The findings identified common awareness and diverse perspectives among stakeholders. First, weak public awareness and confusion were emphasized toward the concept and practice of elder-care SEs. Additionally, although conceptualizing the hybrid nature evoked positive perceptions, the analysis identified a weak consensus about SE norms. In terms of the diverse perspectives of stakeholders, this study found that stakeholders manifested heterogeneous rigor and adherence to social and business dimensions, suggesting the hybrid nature of elder-care SEs. We further interpreted these diverse findings and proposed a framework to explicate different characteristics of stakeholder trust on the basis of hybridity. This research fills a research gap by providing empirical findings on the public trust of an emerging organization. Despite its limitations, the findings demonstrated an understanding of public trust through a relationship-specific perspective, which qualitatively integrated the commonalities and particularities of entities that constitute the public. This work contributes to future studies through its theoretical scope and analytic framework.