Cognitive Determinants of Social Entrepreneurship: Variations According to the Degree of Economic Development

How Does the Development of the Social Enterprise Sector Affect Entrepreneurial Behavior? An Empirical Analysis

“…The research on opportunities identification between social and commercial entrepreneurship is still quite blurred [30]. As previous studies suggest, we found that self-perception of opportunities affected the likelihood to be an entrepreneur [24] but, however, we did not find a differential effect in terms of social versus commercial entrepreneurs [25]. Nevertheless, this could be explained because the competition effect predominated in this case, since the propensity towards SE was lower when the SES was more developed.…”

“…First, there are some relevant factors related to self-perception about entrepreneurship, since individuals consider a set of perceptual variables [11] when making decisions about entrepreneurship. These variables include: (a) self-confidence about one's skills and abilities [21][22][23][24][25][26][27], (b) knowledge of other entrepreneurs [24][25][26][27][28], (c) alertness to unexploited opportunities [19,24,25,29,30], and (d) likelihood of failure [20,[24][25][26][27]30,31]. All these variables are highly correlated to the decision to start a new business.…”

“…Besides, demographic factors such as gender [24][25][26][27][32][33][34][35][36][37], age [24][25][26][27]32,33,38], or education [24][25][26][27]32,33,38,39] are also important drivers of SE.…”

“…However, if we consider the impact of cultural values on SE, the relationship between economic development and SE differs [4,38,43]. In this sense, post-materialism theories propose a different relationship, arguing that the level of SEA will be higher in more developed economies, since people in these countries could have moral codes more related to post-materialistic values [24,[44][45][46].…”

The Manifestation of Entrepreneurial Orientation in the Social Entrepreneurship Context

“…'EO refers to the processes, practices, and decision-making activities that lead to new entry' p. 136) and this may lead to the minimal use of this construct in comparison to Covin and Slevin's (1989) conceptualisation of EO (Covin and Miller 2014). The literature suggests that SEs would not be aggressive nor competitive towards other players, on the contrary, they are collaborative as they all share a common goal of superior social benefit (Montgomery, Dacin, and Dacin 2012;Nicol as, Rubio, and Fern andez-Laviada 2018). Covin and Miller (2014) further agree that competitive aggressiveness may not be evident in all contexts as some encourage collaboration in their entrepreneurial endeavor.…”