From Zoom Discos to Back-Office Scaffolding: Exploring How Regional Social Enterprise Leaders Navigated Complex Organizational Demands and Shaped Technological Choices During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic created significant challenges for human services leaders, including a pivot to technology, as public health restrictions disrupted face-to-face service models. These challenges were exacerbated for social enterprise leaders, whose organizations’ hybrid nature requires balancing social mission and market-driven operational demands. While the human services organizations’ use of technology is documented, less is known about how human services and in particular social enterprise leaders guided technological shifts. Adopting an exploratory qualitative approach, this study draws on semi-structured interviews with ten regional Australian social enterprises leaders and an institutional logics perspective to analyze how they navigated their complex organizational demands and shaped technological choices during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings reveal heterogeneous responses, where while a minority prioritized a single logic to guide their technological choices of adoption, adaptation, and, in one case, refusal, most were not constrained by the competing demands of their hybrid nature. Instead, the presence of multiple logics served as a framework for action, transforming a disruptive situation of ambiguity into a complex interplay of value-driven technological decisions. By mapping the landscape, the study contributes to a deeper understanding of technological choices and the leadership experience in complex human services settings, particularly within resource-constrained contexts.