The (R)evolution of the Social Entrepreneurship Concept: A Critical Historical Review

Abstract

The contested concept of social entrepreneurship has gained particular prominence in academic literature over the last few decades. To explore how patterns of understandings relating to social entrepreneurship have emerged and shifted over time, we undertook a critical historical review focusing on the most highly cited social entrepreneurship articles in each of five time periods over the last 30 years. We identify four thematic areas—conceptualization, theoretical approaches, the search for data, and social change outcomes—characteristic of each period, allowing us to plot the terrain of social entrepreneurship scholarship over time. We show how patterns emerge across these themes over time and relate our analysis to wider developments in the field. In concluding, we discuss how the concept has been theoretically and conceptually enriched by an ability to accommodate critique.

Turning rebellion into money? Social entrepreneurship as the strategic performance of systems change

“…As the social entrepreneurship field has developed, it has begun to incorporate a more sophisticated understanding of systems change, appreciative of the importance of context and the complexity of the change process (see Teasdale et al, 2022). Institutionalist perspectives have diverted attention from a focus on individual social entrepreneurs and highlighted the importance of collective action (de Bruin, Shaw, & Lewis, 2017; Mitzinneck & Besharov, 2019; Montgomery et al, 2012).…”

“…Since social entrepreneurship is predominately studied from the perspectives of management and organization theory (Hota, 2021; Rey‐Martí, Ribeiro‐Soriano, & Palacios‐Marqués, 2016) there is a tendency to measure “success” in terms of organizational survival: for example, a social venture is “successful” if it continues to trade. Social (or systems) change tends to be assumed rather than theorized or empirically tested (Saebi et al, 2019; Teasdale, Bellazzecca, De Bruin, & Roy, 2022). In this essay, we propose a dynamic typology showing how discursive systems change strategies can be reassembled over time to stimulate or deflect desire for change.…”

The impact of social capital on scaling social impact: a systematic literature review

“…We focused on the past 10 years of studies for two reasons: first, scholars began to shift their research focus (Pache and Santos, 2013) from social entrepreneurship to social enterprise in this period by conceptualizing social enterprise as a hybrid organization (Hota, 2021). And second, viewing social entrepreneurship as a collective endeavor, social capital was proposed as a type of social entrepreneurship model (Mair et al, 2012a(Mair et al, , 2012b during this period (Teasdale et al, 2022). Finally, since social entrepreneurship is an emerging field of scientific research (Macke et al, 2018), and the concept of social capital and scaling social impact are relatively new yet poorly understood (Smith et al, 2016), we believe that focusing on the studies within the past 10 years covers an extensive spectrum of relevant studies.…”

“…Indeed, for a sustainable social enterprise ecosystem to thrive, a pluralistic approach is an ideal scenario where advent of collaborative networks of stakeholders and strategic partnerships within individual social enterprise ecosystem would be a norm rather than an exception (Roy and Hazenberg, 2019). As a result, researchers have recently begun to focus more on empirical studies using quantitative data to study this pluralistic approach (Teasdale et al , 2022).…”

A transdisciplinary framework for university-industry collaboration in establishing a social business model

“…There are several streams of thought and business concepts in which sustainable innovation is the main element, such as social entrepreneurship (Mair and Marti, 2006;Roy et al, 2013;Saebi et al, 2019;Teasdale et al, 2022), sustainable entrepreneurship (Belz and Binder, 2017;Genus, 2021), shared-value (Porter and Kramer, 2011;Dembek et al, 2016), triple bottom line (Elkington, 2018;Elkington, 1994) and bottom-of-pyramid innovations (Prahalad, 2012;Olsen and Boxenbaum, 2009). Whilst the characteristics of sustainability-oriented concepts vary (Schaltegger and Wagner, 2011), they each share a joint endeavour to support A transdisciplinary framework businesses to include broader environmental and social contributions in addition to just financial consideration.…”