School of Arts, Social Sciences and Management

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FINANCIAL SUSTAINABILITY BEYOND GRANTS AND DONATIONS: THE CASE OF CHARITY-RUN SOCIAL ENTERPRISES IN SCOTLAND
(2025-12) SIMPSON, EUNICE YAWA
This research investigates the impact of trading results on the funding gap of charity-run social enterprises in Scotland, a crucial topic given the significant decline in public funding for charities. Between 2009-10 and 2020-21, government and local authority funding for charities fell by 23%, equating to a £13.2bn cut (University, 2021) This substantial reduction, a consequence of the global recession, has created a serious funding deficit and survival challenges for charities. To address this pressing issue, a number of charities in Scotland are actively engaging in social enterprise activities, aiming to generate profits to support their parent charities. This study examines the effectiveness of these social enterprises in alleviating the funding gaps of their parent charities, exploring the sustainability of their financial operations and identifying critical success factors and challenges they encounter. The research is framed within the theoretical framework of hybridity and institutional logic, providing a lens through which to understand the complex interplay between social mission and market forces within these organisations. Employing a critical realist framework, the study utilises an abductive approach and a concurrent mixed-method design. Both primary and secondary data sources are employed, including interviews with senior management staff and board members, as well as archival quantitative information covering twelve years from 2011 to 2022. The study reveals that social enterprises in Scotland are indeed narrowing the funding gaps faced by their parent charities. However, a significant finding is that only around 25% of these social enterprises currently appear to be financially sustainable, and even then, at a relatively small margin. Furthermore, the research identifies ten critical success factors and ten challenges that characterise the operation of social enterprises. The findings of this research contribute significantly to the body of knowledge in the field of charity-run social enterprise financial sustainability, providing valuable information for practitioners and researchers. The findings also hold relevance for informing the Scottish Government's third sector policy in supporting social enterprises, contributing to the sector's growth as outlined in its ten-year strategic plan 2016-2026. This research, however, highlights the need for further investigation with a larger sample size to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the financial sustainability of charity-run social enterprises in Scotland.
#LOCALFOOD: A MULTIMETHOD ANALYSIS ON THE PROMOTION OF LOCAL FOOD IN SCOTLAND BY SCOTTISH INFLUENCERS ON INSTAGRAM
(2025) Ishaq, Maryam
This research aims to analyse the role Scottish Foodie Influencers as producers play in promoting local food in Scotland through their everyday lifestyle presentations on Instagram, as well as considering how they use Instagram as a tool to facilitate this communicative practice. This research utilises two methods of data collection to analyse how Influencers promote local food on Instagram: Qualitative semi-structured interviews and a content analysis of their promotional content on Instagram. This research demonstrates how Influencers reproduce social norms about local food through their lifestyle presentation by portraying local food as a distinctive consumer practice that they encourage their followers to emulate. Despite also being motivated by a desire to support local food businesses in Scotland based on their connection to their local area, Influencers still promoted a perception of locality in Scotland that they acknowledged was financially and culturally inaccessible to many. Influencers also adhered to the aesthetic norms of Instagram by constructing an imagined local on Instagram that appealed to the aesthetic conventions of the platform. This style of visual representation prioritised the visual quality of local food over other markers of quality that leaves any discourse around locality as an ethical food practice to promote heritagisation and re-localisation largely absent from the promotion of local food in Scotland on Instagram. This research demonstrates the importance of analysing the effectiveness of a given social media platform in generating a space for online food discourse. These conclusions contribute to the growing scholarship around the digitalization of food and how specific social media platforms play a role in shaping online food discourses. How local food in Scotland is communicated through its aesthetic representations by Scottish Foodie Influencers on Instagram highlights how the conventions of a given social media platform can transform a food practice originally grounded in ethical consumption into a greater emphasis on the social distinction local food can provide consumers in Scotland.