Sentimental Drivers of Social Entrepreneurship: A Study of China's Guangcai (Glorious) Program

Abstract

Social entrepreneurship plays an important role in local development in emerging economies, but scholars have paid little attention to this emerging phenomenon. Under the theory of moral sentiments, we posit that some entrepreneurs are altruistically motivated to promote a morally effective economic system by engaging in social entrepreneurial activities. Focusing on China's Guangcai (Glorious) Program, a social entrepreneurship program initiated by China's private entrepreneurs to combat poverty and contribute to regional development, we find that private entrepreneurs are motivated to participate in such programs if they have more past distressing experiences, including limited educational opportunities, unemployment experience, rural poverty experience, and startup location hardship. Their perceived social status further strengthens these relationships. Our study contributes to the social entrepreneurship literature by offering a moral sentiment perspective that explains why some entrepreneurs voluntarily join a social entrepreneurship program to mitigate poverty in society.

Entrepreneurs’ Networks at Rural Market: Developing a Creative Village in the Yamagata Prefecture, Japan

“…Previous studies have rarely discussed the roles of companies in rural revitalization (Marquis and Davis, 2009). In contrast, many studies define social entrepreneurs as those who are socially oriented rather than profit oriented (van Slyke and Newman, 2006;Zahra et al, 2009;Yiu et al, 2014). Entrepreneurs in this study are primarily profit oriented.…”

Mining Social Entrepreneurship Strategies Using Topic Modeling

“…Although our findings require further testing and exploration, they fill an empirical and theoretical gap regarding what social entrepreneurs actually do [2,4,5]. The SE research has focused on the organizational [6][7][8][9], motivational [10,11], political [12] and definitional [13,14] aspects of social entrepreneurship, but the diversity and key patterns in SE strategies are overlooked. We offer theoretically derived SE strategies associated with the social change, social activism, SE and empowerment literature and extend social entrepreneurship research.…”

“…Importantly, there is a theoretical and empirical gap between theories on social entrepreneurship and what social entrepreneurs actually do, i.e., their strategies to solve society's tough problems [2][3][4][5]. Our extensive review of the SE literature reveals that SE researchers have predominantly sought to explain social value creation from three perspectives: organizational [6][7][8][9], motivational [10,11], and political [12]. These studies complement the larger body of literature that attempts to define and achieve a conceptual breakthrough in the opaque field of SE [2,4,13,14].…”

Why Do Family-controlled Firms Donate to Charity? The Role of Intrafamily Succession Intention, Social Status, and Religiosity

“…When family owners have high social status, they are well known to individuals in their communities (Ma & Parish, 2006;Yiu et al, 2014;Zellweger et al, 2013). As a result, when family-controlled firms make charitable contributions, their philanthropic behavior is more likely to be noticed and, thus, to contribute to family image and reputation (Berrone et al, 2010;Zellweger et al, 2013).…”

“…As a result, these family owners are motivated to make more charitable contributions. Moreover, family owners with high social status will raise their expectation that corporate philanthropy is closely related with family SEW (Yiu, Wan, Ng, Chen, & Su, 2014). Hence, family owners' social status will strengthen the relationship between intrafamily succession intention and corporate philanthropy.…”