Research in social entrepreneurship

Structure – The goal of the article is to bridge the gap between the current understanding of social entrepreneurship and an enhanced knowledge that could aid in researching and fostering this emerging field. – The article analyzes the current state of intellectual exchange among scholars and highlights potential areas of improvement. – The article reviews and critiques existing social entrepreneurship research and propose a model that delineates its conceptual boundaries. – The article suggest that themes of interest to the field of strategic entrepreneurship can be leveraged to offer suggestions for future scholarly research with the potential to shape future research efforts.

Goal – Article states that for social entrepreneurship research advancements in theory building and theory testing are necessary. – Article states that this will lead to an improved understanding of the determinants of social entrepreneurship – Failure to incorporate scholarly advancements will place research in social entrepreneurship in a questionable state of legitimacy and academic merit. – Article claims that a unified definition of social entrepreneurship has yet to emerge – Article states that the lack of unified definition makes establishing the legitimacy of a field or construct difficult. Hinders empirical research seeking to examine the antecedents and consequences of social entrepreneurship and makes comparison across ventures difficult.

Methodology – Analyzed articles published in leading management and entrepreneurship journals where primary topic of interest was related to social entrepreneurship – Articles that explicitly metioned certain words (social entrepreneurship, social venture) without placing boundaries on time period. – Also used databases (EBSCO) to search for articles, in all time periods – Coded how many articles how many articles are published or cited articles in which domain (accounting, management etc) – State that there is a diverse nature of disciplines contributing to entrepreneurship research, based upon existing theories.

– Listed characteristics of conceptual and empirical articles on social entrepreneurship (purpose, methodology, data collection). Conclusion: disparate construct definitions, unclear boundary conditions, anecdotal antecedents of performance-> unity doesn’t exist. Sample sizes relatively low, makes statistical power problematic. – To further develop the field of social entrepreneurship research need to be a more careful distinguish between social entrepreneurship as a process as well as an outcome (IV, DV) – Article encourages management scholars to embrace a broad definition of social entrepreneurship

Concepts – Presents a model with conceptual domains informing social entrepreneurship research: entrepreneurship, public/non profit management, social issues in management, context. – Model informs social value creation by indicating the boundary conditions of social entrepreneurship research based on the social entrepreneurship literature.

Potential avenues for future research – Future research should incorporate other disciplines. Article proposes possible research questions for following disciplines: accounting, anthropology, economics, finance, management, marketing, operations management, political science, psychology, sociology.