Entrepreneurial Identity and Social-Business Tensions – The Experience of Social Entrepreneurs

Sustainable Entrepreneurship at the Bottom of the Pyramid: An Identity-Based Perspective

“…The findings of this study revealed that, due to their multiple frames of reference and basic social motivations, respondents are heterogenous and could be assigned into two groups based on their social identity salience and five subgroups based on their role identity salience (see Table 3). These findings are in line with findings of other scholars [24,33], who established that entrepreneurial social identities usually amount to different levels of saturation of the three social identity types, while Stryker [1] expressed that actors may hold multiple role identities that align with different logics. In this study, respondents with strong saturation of both communitarian and missionary identity types derive self-worth from being able to provide products and services that they perceive as truly beneficial to the community that they are a part of and the society at large.…”

“…Sustainable entrepreneurship relates to entrepreneurial activities that generate economic value while at the same time focusing on ecological and social outcomes [7,17,64]. Prior studies about entrepreneurs and their activities have enhanced an understanding of sustainable entrepreneurship by exploring questions related to, for example; (i) motivations and contribution to sustainability, (ii) managing the tensions and blurring boundaries between social, environmental, and economic goals, and (iii) mobilization of resources for sustainable entrepreneurial activities [7,17,33,38,62]. This body of literature argues that sustainable entrepreneurs are motivated by identities based on both commercial and or ecological logics to sequentially integrate the triple bottom line of social, ecological, and economic goals [20,38,65].…”

“…This study argues that examining entrepreneurs' social and role identities in distinct phases of the sustainable enterprise creation process [35] and in different contexts [39] has the potential to enrich the sustainable entrepreneurship research by offering additional insights into the influence that these identities have on sustainable entrepreneurial activity [33]. In addition, it has been suggested that BOP entrepreneurship differs from mainstream entrepreneurship in terms of process and underlying values and motivations in the communities from which it emerges [40,41].…”

“…While prior research has empirically explored and elaborated on existing primary social identity prototypes among firm founders e.g., [24], whether these are applicable in the context of BOP entrepreneurship is still to be fully examined. Entrepreneurial identities refer to cognitive representations of interpretations and meanings distinctive of entrepreneurs, providing them with a peculiar identity, motivating behavior, and guiding appropriate role behaviors [33]. An identity is related to the type of opportunity that nascent entrepreneurs pursue and could also explain varying levels of entrepreneurial self-efficacy [34].…”

Imprinting Perspective on the Sustainability of Commitments to Competing Institutional Logics of Social Enterprises

“…Because a decision maker makes sense of complex situations [23], experiences different levels of conflicts [24], and determines priorities of organizations [25]; a social entrepreneur, as a decision maker in a social enterprise, is recognized as being crucial to the varying degree of commitments to competing logics, ranging from relatively equal incorporation to a prioritization of one logic over another [26,27]. Therefore, scholars have argued that better understanding of a social entrepreneurial organization's sustainability of competing institutional logics requires more systematic investigation of the background or attributes of a social entrepreneur [28,29].…”