Business and social entrepreneurs in the UK: gender, context and commitment

Abstract

Objectives: What sort of people become social entrepreneurs, and in what way do they differ from business entrepreneurs? This question is important for policy because there has been a shift from direct to indirect delivery of many public services, requiring a professional approach to social enterprise. Yet we know little about who sets up social enterprises. Prior work: Much prior work on social entrepreneurs has been based on small and convenience samples, and this is true in the United Kingdom as elsewhere. An exception is work based on annual UK Global Entrepreneurship monitor (GEM) surveys (e.g. Levie et al., 2006). Approach: Defining and distinguishing business from social entrepreneurs is problematic. However, inclusion of items that measured the relative importance of economic, social and environmental goals in the 2009 UK GEM survey enables us to compare business and social entrepreneurs based on two different definitions: activity-based (setting up or running a new business or any kind of social, voluntary or community activity, venture or initiative) and goals-based (setting up or running a new organisation which has mainly economic goals versus mainly social goals). We use logistic multivariate regression techniques to identify differences between business and social entrepreneurs in demographic characteristics, effort, aspiration, use of resources, industry choice, location and organisational structure, identified from a representative sample of 30,000 adults interviewed in the United Kingdom in 2009. Results: The results show that the odds of an early-stage entrepreneur being a social rather than a business entrepreneur are reduced if they are male, from an ethnic minority, if they work 10 hours or more per week on the venture, and if they ever worked in their parents business, while they are increased if they have higher levels of education and if they are a settled in-migrant to their area. Implications: These results suggest that a high proportion of social enterprise founders are part-time founders. This could be a cause for concern for policy-makers keen to shift delivery of professional services from the public sector to a professional third sector. Future surveys could test if there is a handover of control from founders to full-time managers as social enterprises mature. Value: To our knowledge, this is the first time that large representative samples of business and social entrepreneurs have been compared using multivariate analysis. This type of research complements casebased research, enabling hypotheses raised by qualitative research to be tested on representative samples of a population.

Internationalization and value orientation of entrepreneurial ventures—a Latin American perspective

“…For example, Zahra et al (2009) classified social entrepreneurs into three types: social bricoleurs, social constructionists, and social engineers, based on how entrepreneurs share a passion for pursuing social issues and how they discover social needs, pursue social opportunities, and impact the broader social system. Levie and Hart (2011) classified social ventures based on the sex, age, ethnicity, educational background, and stage on the entrepreneurial process of the entrepreneur based on a survey of 854 samples in the UK. However, none of these theories have embraced the issue of internationalization in the theories.…”

Female Entrepreneurship: Can Cooperatives Contribute to Overcoming the Gender Gap? A Spanish First Step to Equality

“…In addition, an increasing number of women are engaging in cooperatives, to the extent that the percentage of women in the workforce of these organizations surpasses by far that of women in the workforce as a whole [4,5]. This issue has grown in importance considering previous research showing that business entrepreneurs are twice as likely to be male, while numbers of male and female social entrepreneurs were similar [6,7].…”

Entrepreneurial Leadership and Gender: Exploring Theory and Practice in Global Contexts

“…Reflecting emerging trends in the gender and entrepreneurship literatures towards the employment of feminist theories, Patterson () recognizes entrepreneurial leadership as a gendered, social process, acknowledging both follower involvement and individual agency. Recognizing the importance of context, Levie and Hart () explored leadership and gender among social entrepreneurs; Dodd () highlighted women's leadership in the creative industries, and Deacon, Harris, and Worth () studied business leadership in copreneurial businesses. Just as the exploration of gender within entrepreneurship has been critical to helping scholars identify those entrepreneurial endeavors previously considered as “lacking” (Ahl ), exploring gender in the context of entrepreneurial leadership allows us to see leadership from new and different perspectives, and attribute greater recognition to the notion that women's entrepreneurial leadership experiences are actually worthy of investigation in their own right (Carter, Marlow, and Bennett ).…”