The evolution of social entrepreneurship research: a bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of research on social entrepreneurship through a bibliometric study and the use of Gartner’s (1985) framework to determine the evolution of this academic field. Design/methodology/approach The study is based on all conceptual and research papers published in the Social Enterprise Journal, the first publication to exclusively explore the social entrepreneurship field, from 2005 to 2017 and is conducted with the use of the open-source software package R. The work proposes an overview of the field and a deeper investigation through a bibliometric analysis and the use of Gartner’s framework to categorize the field in four dimensions: individual, organization, process and environment. Findings This work studied the development of social entrepreneurship as an emergent field, identifying key authors, institutions and their geographic origins, research and data collection methods and the key topics analyzed in each category, according to Gartner’s framework. Practical implications This work offers an overview of the status of research in the field and the main topics studied in this emerging field, with the potential to orient researchers to find new topics and possible gaps that needs further investigating. Originality/value This paper provides valuable contributions through a bibliometric analysis that is not very explored in the literature. It presents a general structure of the field and details of the main topics studied in this discipline.

Rural social enterprises in Europe: A systematic literature review

“…15. This bias towards articles published in the UK is in line with similar biases found in previous literature reviews (see for example Littlewood and Kahn, 2018;Matei and Sandu, 2011) and bibliometric analyses (see for example Dionisio, 2019;Granados et al, 2011;Rey-Mart ı et al, 2016) around the topic of social enterprises and social entrepreneurship. All of these studies find a bias towards articles published in the UK.…”

Ethical Judgments About Social Entrepreneurship in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Influence of Spatio-Cultural Meanings

“…This is relevant to business ethics research if SE is defined as a set of practices (Dey and Steyaert 2016) drawing upon "socialised moral norms that reflect the social systems in which morals are embedded" (Anderson and Smith 2007, p. 4). The extant literature suggests that institutional contexts influence how SE is defined (Dionisio 2019;Kerlin 2010Kerlin , 2012, but focuses less on the process within which SE is exported and filtered into other contexts. This creates a gap concerning the extent to which assumptions about the ethics of SE are relevant beyond Western settings and more specifically, in sub-Saharan Africa (Zoogah et al 2015).…”

“…Our theorising is limited if judged against the aim of developing pan-African theory (George et al 2016), for instance by making cross-country comparisons. We acknowledge the need to develop theory that can generalise across African countries and indeed between global regions (Dionisio 2019). Such research may be better served by future studies employing variance-based theory to identify antecedents and study their influence on outcomes across regions and between countries.…”

The Impact of the University Classroom on Managing the Socio-Educational Well-being: A Global Study

“…It has been shown that Scopus has more indexed journals than Web of Science, in addition to minimizing the risk of losing documents during the search. Among its advantages, it stands out that it is easily accessible and offers some tools for viewing and analyzing data, as well as the option to download content in different formats, and that it provides a variety of data for each selected publication, its analysis and the comparison between them [73].…”