Doing Well by (Not) Doing Good?: Indian Impact Investors and Social Entrepreneurs’ Justifications for Profit-Making

• In Event: Culture and Economic Life

Abstract

According to the Global Impact Investing Network, “impact investments are investments made with the intention to generate positive, measurable social or environmental impact alongside a financial return” (Global Impact Investing Network 2025). In 2024, members of the Indian Impact Investors’ Council entered into USD 4.96 billion worth of equity deals in businesses ranging from electric scooters to market platforms for farmers to AI based diagnostic services for breast cancer (India Impact Investors Council 2025). Earlier studies of impact investing have studied how investors measure the social value of their investments and make a persuasive case that investors deliberately shape the value of their investments to account for social impact (Barman 2016, 2020; Bourgeron 2020; Chiapello and Godefroy 2017; Lilleng 2025). Valuing social impact in terms of metrics provides a means to make investments commensurable, and therefore legitimate (Espeland and Sauder 2007).
But impact investors, and the businesses in which they invest, also aim to make profits. Is making profits at odds with the goal of generating measurable social impact– and if so, how do managers address this tension? In this paper, I use interviews with CEOs and senior executives and impact investment firms and social entrepreneurs in India, as well as others in the social enterprise ecosystem (n=19) to examine how these organizations navigate moral choices around impact investment. I argue that investors and entrepreneurs legitimate impact investments differently for different audiences, whether this is for the world at large, limited partners of investors, or between themselves. To maintain legitimacy across audiences, managers at these firms draw on a moral justification that can translate across contexts – that they intend to create social value. Importantly, even as actors in this relationship do the work of maintaining legitimacy for different audiences, they draw upon related and internally coherent moral justifications.

Author

• Anupama Kumar, University of Wisconsin-Madison