Making Meaning Across Cultures: Inclusion as a Structural Condition for the Social Performance of Mission-Driven Organizations in Morocco

Abstract

This article examines how culturally situated inclusion operates as a structural condition for the social performance of mission-driven organizations in intercultural contexts. Drawing on twenty-eight semi-structured interviews conducted with professionals from four organizational sectors in Morocco; non-governmental organizations, educational institutions, startups, and family businesses; the study mobilizes a critical and interpretive epistemology articulated with an ethnographic sensitivity attentive to the cultural production of meaning. The analysis brings out three interrelated dynamics that together compose a cultural grammar of social performance: intercultural negotiation as a process of meaning production, symbolic inclusion as a relational lever of engagement, and recognition as a foundational act inscribing agents within the symbolic economies of allegiance. By bridging critical inclusion studies and social business research; two literatures that have so far evolved largely in parallel; the article argues that inclusion, when conceived in its relational, epistemic, and affective dimensions, is not a managerial supplement but a structural infrastructure of mission integrity. The Moroccan setting offers a generative case for rethinking social performance in Global South contexts, inviting a move beyond procedural approaches to inclusion toward a culturally situated analytics of the internal conditions of mission.