Purpose Social entrepreneurship has become a growing field of research interest. Yet, past research has been held back by the lack of a rigorous measurement instrument. Rather than defining social entrepreneurship as an organizational form that a venture does or does not have, this paper agrees with Dees and Anderson (2006) that the construct is better thought of as a set of practices, processes and behaviors that organizations can engage in to a higher or a lesser degree. In other words, the construct is a set of behaviors that any organization can engage in. The purpose of the paper is to develop scale items to measure the construct of organizational social entrepreneurship (OSE). Design/methodology/approach Drawing on previous literature, this paper first develops and then validates scales for measuring OSE as a third-order formative construct. As its second order, the scale includes three components that capture the heterogeneity of the OSE concept: social change intention, commercial activity and inclusive governance. Findings The OSE scale is developed and tested through a sample of 182 nascent social enterprises from 55 different countries in the world and then revalidated using a second sample of 263 mature social enterprises from 6 European countries. Results suggest that the scale items exhibit internal consistency, reliability, construct validity and nomological validity. Research limitations/implications The scale presented here offers an important new venue for social entrepreneurship theorizing. First, it allows scholars to take a broad approach toward a diverse field and to study OSE behavior in any empirical field in which it may occur. Second, the scales also allow for more focused theorizing. Scholars are encouraged to delve into the antecedents of all three components presented here and to study the different performance effects they have in terms of likelihood to survive, growth rate or potential to achieve financial sustainability. Originality/value The paper develops a multidimensional construct for OSE. In particular, the authors propose scale items for three central components of social entrepreneurship, namely, social change intentions, commercial activities and inclusive governance. The scales thus measure the three formative dimensions identified by Dees and Anderson (2006) and Defourny and Nyssens (2010).

Structured AbstractPurpose -The article aims to understand how resource constraints are addressed in the development of a marketing strategy by a social enterprise.Methodology -The authors have used an in-depth case study of collaboration between a Finnish university and an Indian social enterprise as the methodology for our research in which the data were collected over a period of two years. The data involve semi-structured interviews, field notes and student reports.Findings -The authors propose bricolage as a method of marketing ingenuity in resource-constrained social enterprises. Network bricolage and entrepreneurship education bricolage were identified as two mechanisms adopted to address resource constraints in the early stage of the development of a social enterprise.Research limitations/ implications -Network bricolage is a type of bricolage in which an entrepreneur utilizes existing personal and professional networks as a resource at hand. Whereas networking and resource leveraging imply that the founders of an organization pursue resources from previously unknown people, network bricolage involves already known contacts of the entrepreneur. Further studies need to be conducted to test the applicability of network bricolage among a variety of small and medium-sized enterprises and start-ups. Bricolage could be explored in more detail as an alternative to resource leveraging to understand the marketing activities of social businesses in their initial stages.Practical implications -Another type of bricolage that the authors observed was entrepreneurship education bricolage. A combination of students, business mentors and university resources such as faculty members was utilized as an ingenuity mechanism to develop creative solutions for a shortage of marketing resources.Originality/value -The theoretical framework of entrepreneurial bricolage is applied in the context of the marketing of a social enterprise.

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