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Entrepreneurship for the Public Good: A Review, Critique, and Path Forward for Social and Environmental Entrepreneurship Research
... By harnessing market-based methods to solve social issues, social enterprises have received great attention from researchers and practitioners (Asarkaya & Keles Taysir, 2019;Heinze et al., 2016;Ip et al., 2021;Saebi et al., 2019). According to the literature, young social enterprises-defined as social enterprises younger than 12 years old (Hannan et al., 1996;Siqueira et al., 2018)-often face legitimacy issues related to their image since they follow dual objectives which are simultaneously profit and non-profit oriented (Costanzo et al., 2014;Ebrahim et al., 2014;Vedula et al., 2022). An enterprise image is defined as the overall external impression, set of beliefs, feelings, and associations of the enterprise (Riordan et al., 1997;Zhu & Chang, 2013). ...
... Social enterprises, for instance, strive to improve the lives of disadvantaged people or secure biodiversity by implementing entrepreneurial methods that help generate revenues (Doherty et al., 2014;Saebi et al., 2019). In contrast to this dual mission, for-profit or commercial enterprises focus on maximizing shareholders' financial returns while social aims are secondary (Battilana & Lee, 2014;Saebi et al., 2019;Vedula et al., 2022). Likewise, the dual mission distinguishes social enterprises from non-profit organizations, which may also generate income (e.g., donations). ...
... The dual mission of social enterprises, however, entails the challenge of gaining legitimacy from stakeholders (i.e., employees, potential customers, potential investors, and suppliers), which is particularly necessary for young enterprises (Doherty et al., 2014;O'Neil & Ucbasaran, 2016;Siqueira et al., 2018;Wiklund et al., 2010). Hence, legitimacy is a prerequisite for young social enterprises' success, making it particularly important (Vedula et al., 2022). Social enterprises, on the one hand, face the challenge that incorporating two missions can produce conflicting demands and implies a balance between social and economic means and aims. ...
Social enterprises follow the dual mission of achieving social aims as well as attaining financial sustainability and therefore elude easy categorization into either a non-profit or for-profit organization. Consequently, social enterprises might struggle with their image since external stakeholders (e.g., job applicants and customers) could hold back their support when the enter-prise's dual aims seem unusual to them. Despite the importance of the image to gain stakeholder support, factors that determine how individuals perceive social enterprises are underexplored, especially in their early life stages before they have developed reputational capital and brand recognition. Following human value theory , we propose that stakeholders' self-transcendence ("other-oriented") versus self-enhancement ("self-cen-tered") values explain how they evaluate social versus commercial enterprises. In a vignette study with 945 individuals, we reveal that social enterprises are more likely to attract self-transcendent individuals whereas individuals with stronger self-enhancement values are less likely to feel attracted to social enterprises. Moreover, our findings show that individuals' values were more strongly related to the image of social enterprises than to the image of commercial enterprises. Thus, external individuals' values lead to stronger and more contrasting reactions regarding social compared to commercial enterprises. The findings indicate that the image of social enterprises is more equivocal and distinct compared to commercial enterprises and therefore might require a different theoretical understanding and careful management as it depends on stakeholders' deep-seated values.
... Research on entrepreneurship has been receiving increasing attention from management scholars. Accordingly, new research topics have emerged in studying entrepreneurship , such as green entrepreneurship, ecological entrepreneurship (Schaper, 2002), sustainable entrepreneurship (Dean and McMullen, 2007), environmental entrepreneurship (Meek et al., 2010), social entrepreneurship (Stenn, 2016), and entrepreneurship for the public good (Vedula et al., 2022). These seemingly different concepts explore the relationship between entrepreneurship and sustainable development from different theoretical perspectives and angles. ...
... We expand the focus level from the organization level into the region/ city level, based on a case study of Yiwu, thereby offering a fresh macroview of social entrepreneurship and sustainable development. Most current research has focused on the organizational and firm levels (Vedula et al., 2022). Prior research focusing on the organizational level of social entrepreneurship and sustainable development has explored resource mobilization (Belz andBinder, 2017), entrepreneurial process (O'Neil andUcbasaran, 2016;DiVito and Bohnsack, 2017), and innovation (Youssef et al., 2018). ...
... We identify the key factors and experiences of social entrepreneurship in promoting sustainable development in Yiwu and contributing to research and practice in this essential growing field. More broadly, we answer the entrepreneurship calls for public goods scholars who have long advocated an inductive approach to casting more light on social entrepreneurship and sustainable development (Anand et al., 2021;Vedula et al., 2022). One next step is to conduct careful empirical examinations of our framework with larger samples and across types of firms and geographical locations, including in other provinces in China and other developing countries. ...
Social entrepreneurship is an important driving force for sustainable development. One existing problem with the current literature is that it is not fully clear under what conditions social entrepreneurship can promote sustainable economic, social, and environmental developments. The research evidence is even less in developing and emerging economies like China. Once an impoverished area, Yiwu has gone through a unique evolution path and developed into one of China’s top 10 wealthiest counties and a model city for sustainable development. In this study, based on a multilevel perspective and through analyzing objective statistical records and public archive data in Yiwu, we trace social entrepreneurship and sustainable development in Yiwu in recent decades. We make numerous theoretical contributions to social entrepreneurship and sustainable development literature. We identify the key factors and explore the roles of social entrepreneurship in promoting sustainable development in Yiwu. We discuss theoretical implications for social entrepreneurship specifically and entrepreneurship in general and make future research recommendations for our framework. Overall, we broaden and deepen the research on social entrepreneurship and sustainable development in an emerging economy.
... Recent papers by Arend (2020) and McMullen et al. (2021) suggest that this angst has not abated as the field continues to attract scholars from different disciplines and fragment into subareas such as corporate entrepreneurship (Phan, Wright, Ucbasaran, & Tan, 2009), institutional entrepreneurship (Leca, Battilana, & Boxenbaum, 2005), social entrepreneurship (Mair & Martí, 2006) and environmental entrepreneurship (Vedula et al., 2022). Per these authors: ...
... Rather than focusing on theory development as an end, we believe that a worthy purpose would be to focus on questions where entrepreneurship research is uniquely positioned to add value. There are many avenues that such work might take, but we see great potential in focusing on how entrepreneurship can tackle social, environmental, and economic issues (Markman et al., 2019;Vedula et al., 2022). Research on these topics has the potential to create useful knowledge, while rallying scholars from varied disciplinary backgrounds around an increasingly resonant cause. ...
... How can we ensure that the field takes on dragons rather than tilting at windmills (e.g., by pursuing theoretical purity)? The key is to prioritize research that offers useful insight into important issues: if entrepreneurship scholars embrace this mantle, we should naturally welcome varied perspectives, support communities of practice, and celebrate scholarship that applies diverse lenses to offer fresh insight into questions that we collectively care about answering (Wry & Haugh, 2018;Vedula et al., 2022). ...
In this essay, we argue that it is folly to stake the legitimacy and value of entrepreneurship research on the uniqueness of its theory. A better path is to orient around questions where we are uniquely positioned to create useful and important knowledge. To this end, we anchor on Venkataraman’s (1997) seminal definition and argue that entrepreneurship research should focus on understanding the outcomes of venture creation not just for founders, but also for other stakeholders and society as a whole. Moreover, we argue that generating robust insight into these questions requires contributions from multiple perspectives, and this makes our field’s theoretical diversity a great, and under-appreciated asset. Drawing on the metaphor of “borderlands,” we argue that embracing and leveraging diversity can help to address important social and environmental problems, while also laying a foundation for the unique identity so long sought by members of our field.
... Social movements are known to affect entrepreneurship (Meek, Pacheco & York, 2010;Tolbert et al., 2011;Vedula, Doblinger, Pacheco, York, Bacq, Russo, & Dean, 2021) and to adapt their positioning to new industries (Pacheco et al., 2014;York & Hargrave, 2014). They influence the emergence of new and alternative industries because they "facilitate access to information and guide attention", and "confer legitimacy, induce demand, and participate in the establishment of industry infrastructure" (Georgallis & Lee, 2015: 1-2). ...
... A private politics approach thus has the objective of getting the public to internalize the social movements' perspective (Lenox & Easley, 2009). To the extent that this perspective is normative (Reid & Toffel, 2009), it is likely to have implications for how the public approaches an industry or a product (Hiatt et al., 2009;Vedula et al., 2021). Movements using a private politics strategy can either privilege general contestation of an industry (Hiatt et al., 2015) or more specifically build upon moral arguments (e.g., Reid & Toffel, 2009). ...
... Our work makes several contributions to the growing literature on the influence of social movements on entrepreneurship (Tolbert et al., 2011;Vedula et al. 2021). Social movements often encourage entrepreneurial entry when it aligns with their objectives (Georgallis et al., 2019;Meek et al, 2010), thus triggering the emergence of new industries (Pacheco et al., 2014). ...
What makes social movements successfully deter entry in contested industries? We develop a contingency framework explaining how their success depends on the internal fit between movements’ private and public politics strategies with the tactics of mass and elite mobilization. We also highlight the importance of how these tactics fit with external conditions like the cognitive legitimacy of the industry and industry countermobilization. When movements rely on a private politics strategy to condemn an industry in the eyes of the public, social movement mass will be decisive. Alternatively, when movements use a public politics strategy to push for regulatory intervention, the mobilization of elites is crucial. We develop our understanding of external contingency factors by exploring how cognitive legitimacy residuals from local ancestral populations affect both mass-driven private politics and elite-driven public politics, and how national-level industry countermobilization efforts affect elite-driven public politics strategies. We test these ideas in a historical study of the Scottish whisky distilling industry during the rise of temperance movements (1823-1921). We contribute to the social movements literature by showing how movements’ entry deterrence in contested industries depends on the internal fit between their strategies and mobilization tactics, as well as on their engagement with external contingencies.
... To reduce biases and enhance the rigor of our analysis, we employed a systematic-that is, transparent and replicable-review methodology (Tranfield et al., 2003). Following other reviews that identified a sharp increase in articles on the topic of societal impact published in management and entrepreneurship journals around 2007 (Battilana and Lee, 2014;Vedula et al., 2022), we focused our search on work published in English that appeared in peer-reviewed journal publications between 01/01/2006 and 12/31/2020. While most systematic reviews in management and entrepreneurship journals focus primarily on specific journal lists such as the Financial Times 50 or the British Academic Journal Guide from the Chartered Association of Business Schools to identify the journals to include in a review (e.g., Matthews et al., 2018;Sutter et al., 2019), we believe doing so would have been insufficient to capture the range of research germane to this study for two reasons: a) important insights pertaining to emerging research topics are often not published in top-ranked journals (Jané et al., 2018), and b) such an approach would turn a blind eye to the vast body of relevant knowledge that exists outside of the management and entrepreneurship literature. ...
... We searched for carefully chosen keywords-"(social OR environmental OR societal) AND (impact OR value OR change OR responsibility OR action OR performance) AND entrepreneur* AND communit*"-in the title, abstract and/or keywords of articles. The keywords to capture the notion of societal impact were meant to be inclusive, and paralleled what other reviews of the field have used (e.g., Battilana and Lee, 2014;Vedula et al., 2022). The search term "entrepreneur*" was also chosen based on recent literature reviews (Sutter et al. 2019). 2 We then triangulated the list of journals provided by our experts (step 2) with the list generated by the database search (step 3). ...
... Such studies could trigger insights into the agentic roles played by communities, and enrich the CBE stream of research which to date mainly appears in the Management and (Saldarriaga-Isaza et al., 2015;Vazquez and Gonzalez, 2015). Other disciplines, in particular Development, also appear more balanced when it comes to discussing both positive and negative impacts of entrepreneurship in relation to communities, which Management and Entrepreneurship scholars have been urged to consider (Vedula et al., 2022). ...
Although there is wide recognition of the importance of entrepreneurship for generating societal impact, entrepreneurial activities alone rarely achieve a positive impact without the engagement of communities. To date, however, entrepreneurship researchers have tended to overlook the importance of community for creating societal impact through entrepreneurship, and lack a comprehensive understanding of the nature and roles of communities. To address this, we conduct a systematic review of the literature published in 51 journals across the Management and Entrepreneurship, Economic Development/Community Development, Economic Geography and Regional Science, Energy, and Public Administration disciplines, that makes three contributions. First, it identifies a new typology of community and proposes a comprehensive framework of roles through which societal impact is created by entrepreneurship for, in, with, enabled by, and driven by communities. Second, it demonstrates that the key to understanding how community relates to societal impact creation is to jointly account for both its type(s) and role(s). By linking community types and roles, the findings also suggest a theoretical contribution based on the relationship between the degree of formalization of a community type, and the degree of agency that a community role enacts. Third, the review underscores that communities are not just static settings but can also be dynamic actors in efforts to use entrepreneurship to create societal impact. Our cross-disciplinary review highlights trends and gaps in the extant literature and provides researchers with an evidence-based research agenda to guide future inquiry on this vital topic.
... Thus, this paper connects social venturing to social activism (Vedula et al. 2022) where business plans are declarative doctrines of social change. We also contribute to social entrepreneurship practice, particularly to processes of stakeholder engagement. ...
... For instance, conceiving social entrepreneurship as a form of social movement would challenge the economic-based assumption of scale as a signal of success, and would instead shift the conversation to incorporate social movement theories of growth and stability through organizational splintering and diffusion of cells. In doing so, this paper provides insight into the possibilities of an interdisciplinary conversation of entrepreneurship and social movement theory, thus adding to the call for research on the intersection of those two fronts (Vedula et al. 2022). ...
As social entrepreneurship gains maturity, research has begun to explore the less alluring aspects of the field, including the heroic stance of social entrepreneurs, the assumed moral superiority of their intentions, and the misleading emphasis on solutionism. In this paper, we explore a central component of this criticism, which is the construction of un-realistic venture ideas in social entrepreneurs’ pitches for social change. We analysed social venture business plans and the written feedback provided by judges during a social venture competition, and we used speech act theory to analyse the claims and promises triggering judges’ disbelief. We discovered three linguistic artefacts that underlie the construction of un-realistic venture ideas in social entrepreneurship, which we label holism, devotion, and enlightenment. While these artefacts trigger disbelief, they also play an expressive role as they channel both contestation and dreams. We leverage magical realism to forward an alternative explanation of how venture ideas in social entrepreneurship can act as a cultural form of social protest, which can be seen as a historically contingent, modern revolution.
... Entrepreneurship has been theorized as a critical driver of social change (Lounsbury & Glynn, 2019;Nicholls, 2006;Stephan, Patterson, Kelly, & Mair, 2016;Vedula, Doblinger, Pacheco, York, Bacq, Russo, & Dean, 2022). A growing number of studies speak to the emancipatory power of entrepreneurship for those who face significant constraints such as discrimination and exclusion from the workforce as a result of stigmatization-that is, when a person or group is devalued and marginalized based on perceptions of physical, emotional, servile, tribal, or moral stigma (Rindova, Barry, & Ketchen, 2009;Rindova, Srinivas, & Martins, 2022;. ...
... In fact, our emancipatory pathway is unique in that it seems to have both components of necessity entrepreneurship (Ballesteros-Sola & Osorio-Novela, 2021; Doering & Wry, 2022;Weber, Fasse, Haugh, & Grote, 2022) and social entrepreneurship. These two types of entrepreneurship have been cast as distinct: one being selfinterested and driven out of need (Dencker et al., 2021), the other being other-orientated and driven by a desire for change (Chatterjee, Cornelissen, & Wincent, 2021;George, Haas, Joshi, McGahan, & Tracey, 2022;Miller et al., 2012;Vedula et al., 2022). Yet, while the entrepreneurs following the emancipatory pathway may be experiencing conditions of material necessity (similar to necessity entrepreneurs) and are removing constraints for themselves and others (which aligns with the concept of emancipatory entrepreneurship), they also aim at creating broader societal change by tackling shame (similar to social entrepreneurs). ...
Shame has been identified as a debilitating emotion that impedes entrepreneurial action. Yet, there are many examples of people who experience shame and go on to create entrepreneurial ventures. How then is entrepreneurship possible in the face of such shame? To address this question, we develop a theoretical process model that highlights the connection between individual and collective experiences of shame and elaborates when and how such experiences may lead to entrepreneurship. We suggest that third-person experiences of shame can transform first-person experiences and trigger identification with a community of similarly stigmatized others. We argue that the distinct narratives provided by these communities can reduce or enhance entrepreneurial self-efficacy, and therefore lead to different entrepreneurial pathways: some individuals may create ventures out of necessity, while others will create ventures that act as shame-free havens for themselves and others, and become a source of emancipation and social change. By outlining distinct entrepreneurial pathways out of shame, we extend current research at the intersection of entrepreneurship, necessity, emancipation, and social change.
... At the same time, our focus differs from prior reviews of social entrepreneurship in several important ways. Certainly, a number of prior reviews have focused on discrete aspects of social entrepreneurship, such as definitions of social entrepreneurship (Aliaga-Isla & Huybrechts, 2018; Bacq & Janssen, 2011), particular organizational forms (Battilana & Lee, 2014;Doherty et al., 2014), scalability factors (van Lunenburg et al., 2020), social entrepreneurial intentions (Tan et al., 2020), social performance and impact measurement (Beer & Micheli, 2018;Rawhouser et al., 2019), the structure of the field in general (Bansal et al., 2019;Gupta et al., 2020), and relations to other streams such as environmental entrepreneurship (Vedula et al., 2022). But these reviews stop short of conceptualizing and analysing different categories of positive societal effects and pathways for achieving them. ...
... EBSCO Host, Web of Science Core Collection, Scopus, ScienceDirect) for relevant studies. Following prior work (e.g., van Lunenburg et al., 2020;Vedula et al., 2022), we identified keyword combinations that collectively encompass social entrepreneurship and related concepts (e.g., social innovation). After deleting duplicates, non-English articles, articles in journals with no management or business focus and articles in journals that were ranked below C according to the VHB-JOURQUAL 3 ranking, 5,745 articles remained. ...
Social entrepreneurship has emerged as an important means of addressing grand challenges. Although research on the topic has accelerated, scholars have yet to articulate an overarching framework that links the different pathways taken by social entrepreneurs with the positive effects of these efforts. To address this shortcoming, we conducted a systematic literature review which enabled us to conceptually differentiate between social value and social change as distinct outcomes of social entrepreneurship and identify seven pathways for achieving these outcomes. Building on our analysis, we outline a research agenda for questions pertaining to: the dynamics between social value and social change; how contextual factors and social entrepreneurs influence various pathways; design principles of business models and innovations that facilitate social value and social change; and defining, measuring, and ensuring accountability for social value and social change.
... According to Abu-Saifan (2012), social entrepreneurs are mission-driven people who use entrepreneurial behaviors to deliver social value to less privileged communities through an innovative entity that is financially independent, self-sufficient, or sustainable. They partner with a wide array of actors to achieve their social goals (Vedula et al 2021). Light (2006, 14) argues that some researchers have defined social entrepreneurs as "individuals who launch entirely new social-purpose nonprofit ventures," but he considers this definition too narrow and excluding many innovators who belong in a discussion of social entrepreneurship. ...
... The ambiguity and uncertainty inherent in innovation routinely lead entrepreneurs to suffer cognitive and emotional stress over deciding which potential collaborators to approach and which to avoid (Lichtenstein, 2014). Organizational tensions often arise when different parts of a social entrepreneurial coalition have different beliefs and practices that guide their actions such as whether it makes sense to ally with Socialists or Communists in a strike (Vedula et al, 2021). But people with different backgrounds are more likely differ in how they use language and decode messages than people raised in similar circumstances and thus may be more likely to differ in how they want to tackle a particular social issue (Robbins and Judge, 2018). ...
Purpose
This paper aims to add information on how women's voices enriched American social entrepreneurship in the Progressive era. While most discussions of women as social entrepreneurs have centered on white middle class women, this article profiles two female agents for change and innovation who came out of the white working class and Boston's Black elite, respectively. These additions provide an analysis of female participation that takes account of issues of intersectionality and positionality, important concepts in contemporary critical theory.
Design/methodology/approach
This article extends our understanding of women's role as social entrepreneurs in the early twentieth century by offering biographies of Rose Schneiderman and Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin based on extensive examination of sources from Progressive era documents to contemporary scholarly analyses. Inclusion of Progressive era sources enables the narrative to suggest how these social entrepreneurs were viewed in their own day.
Findings
Biographies of Rose Schneiderman and Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin indicate the broad range of women who developed new organizations to serve traditionally marginalized populations in the Progressive era. The article shows the types of obstacles each woman faced; it enumerates strategies they used to further their aims as well as recording some of the times they could not surmount class- or race-based obstacles placed in their paths.
Originality/value
At a time when issues of intersectionality and positionality have become more prominent in management discourse, this article expands the class and race backgrounds of women specifically proposed as icons of social entrepreneurship. It represents an early attempt to link these concepts with the study of entrepreneurship.
... At the same time, our focus differs from prior reviews of social entrepreneurship in several important ways. Certainly, a number of prior reviews have focused on discrete aspects of social entrepreneurship, such as definitions of social entrepreneurship (Aliaga-Isla & Huybrechts, 2018; Bacq & Janssen, 2011), particular organizational forms (Battilana & Lee, 2014;Doherty et al., 2014), scalability factors (van Lunenburg et al., 2020), social entrepreneurial intentions (Tan et al., 2020), social performance and impact measurement (Beer & Micheli, 2018;Rawhouser et al., 2019), the structure of the field in general (Bansal et al., 2019;Gupta et al., 2020), and relations to other streams such as environmental entrepreneurship (Vedula et al., 2022). But these reviews stop short of conceptualizing and analysing different categories of positive societal effects and pathways for achieving them. ...
... EBSCO Host, Web of Science Core Collection, Scopus, ScienceDirect) for relevant studies. Following prior work (e.g., van Lunenburg et al., 2020;Vedula et al., 2022), we identified keyword combinations that collectively encompass social entrepreneurship and related concepts (e.g., social innovation). After deleting duplicates, non-English articles, articles in journals with no management or business focus and articles in journals that were ranked below C according to the VHB-JOURQUAL 3 ranking, 5,745 articles remained. ...
... Increasingly, management scholars have recognized the role of business in addressing these challenges by investigating an array of contextual (e.g., Doh, Tashman, & Benischke, 2019;George et al., 2021a) and theoretical perspectives (e.g., Howard-Grenville et al., 2019;Howard-Grenville & Spengler, 2022;Vedula et al., 2022). These studies build on an increasing recognition that "business is a part of society and not apart from society, and, therefore, acceptable standards of behavior are drawn from society and practiced in business, rather than having opposing standards within each sphere" (Hollensbe, Wookey, Hickey, George, & Nichols, 2014: 1228. ...
We conduct a theory-guided review of the literatures on public-private partnerships and Grand Challenges (GCs). We adopt an organization design approach to review and identify constructs in public-private collaborations (PPCs) that address societal challenges. Our review identifies the complexities of organizing to tackle GCs, highlights the plurality of organizational forms in PPCs, and explores organizational design considerations in these partnerships. Given the elevated role of private actors in these collaborations, our review provides a new understanding of how they can shape a private-public interface that is robust to the scale and scope of global problems. This leads to a rich research agenda on when, why, and how public and private collaborations matter, and their implications for addressing societal challenges.
... Entrepreneurship related to environmental (Muñoz and Cohen, 2018;Pacheco et al., 2010) or social problems (Austin et al., 2012;Mair and Martí, 2006) has been central to entrepreneurship research for two decades. Recent work emphasizes the need to foreground the public good character and the essential role of collectives in entrepreneurship centered on societal challenges (Vedula et al., 2022). The turn in focus towards impact entrepreneurship (Markman et al., 2019) also offers opportunities to recognize the role of citizens and the public sector as active participants in the social innovation process, i.e., the process of developing and scaling solutions to societal challenges (Tracey and Stott, 2017;Voorberg et al., 2015). ...
Within the entrepreneurship literature, there is a growing interest in understanding collective entrepreneurial approaches to tackling societal challenges. In this study, we examine the orchestration of collective action in an open social innovation project bringing together public administrations, citizens and organized civil society to collaboratively address several societal challenges. Analyzing data generated in-situ and in real-time over the entire duration of the project we show how social impact orchestration can generate impact through four pathways: lead user focus, solution focus, problem focus, and ecosystem focus. For each pathway, we show how orchestration enhanced the impact potential of stakeholders involved by enabling learning and scaling. Our study contributes to the literature on impact entrepreneurship and advances knowledge on orchestrating innovation for social impact.
... When resourcing their ventures, social entrepreneurs engage with diverse external resource providers, such as local authorities, (social) investors, beneficiaries, philanthropists, and other stakeholders (Clough et al., 2019;Meyskens et al., 2010;Vedula et al., 2022). Entrepreneurial resourcing research has primarily focused on when and how social entrepreneurs use specific approaches to access and repurpose external resources (Bacq & Eddleston, 2018;Desa & Basu, 2013;Kwong et al., 2017). ...
While resourcing their ventures, entrepreneurs and stakeholders face and deal with unexpected situations, permeating the entrepreneurship process. Drawing on an entrepreneurship as practice approach, we explore how an entrepreneurial resourcing practice is collectively enacted, reconfigured, and repaired after a sudden practice collapse. Through a longitudinal case study of a social venture–public collaboration process, we reveal the collective repair work of a collapsing entrepreneurial resourcing practice and the role of emotions as a hidden element in the resourcing practice and the repair work enacted.
... Covering the full range of adult ages would also take a long time (Zhao et al., 2021). (Miller et al., 2012;Stephan & Drencheva, 2017; see Saebi et al. (2019) and Vedula et al. (2022) for recent reviews). More specifically, our findings identify more highly educated women in midlife as a potentially promising group for targeted support. ...
We advance research on social entrepreneurship by offering a constraint-based individual perspective of “who” (gender, education) chooses to create social value “when” in their life course (proxied by age). Integrating predictions from situational strength theory in psychology and the life course perspective in sociology, we theorize that resource constraints determine at what age entrepreneurs are likely to prioritize social relative to economic value creation goals when starting their enterprise. We examine the intersection of entrepreneur age with gender and education to account for distinct patterns of resource constraints over the life course. Multilevel analyses of nationally representative samples of 5,251 new entrepreneurs from 44 countries reveal a robust curvilinear (U-shaped) relationship between age and social value creation and a steeper U-curve for more highly educated women. Our study offers a springboard for future entrepreneurship research considering individuals’ constraints on prosocial value expression by applying intersectional analyses.
... To date, research has largely examined how firm entry impacts the emergence of moral markets (Meek et al. 2010, Durand and Georgallis 2018, Hoppmann and Vermeer 2019. Our understanding of firm survival in this context is comparatively sparse (Kapoor and Furr 2015, Georgallis and Durand 2017, Vedula et al. 2021). This gap is problematic given that traditional industry emergence research emphasizes not only entry, but also firm survival dynamics (Baldwin and Gorecki 1991, Agarwal and Gort 1996, Malerba and Orsenigo 1996, Dunne et al. 2013. ...
A growing body of scholarship studies the emergence of moral markets—sectors offering market-based solutions to social and environmental issues. To date, researchers have largely focused on the drivers of firm entry into these values-laden sectors. However, we know comparatively little about postentry dynamics or the determinants of firm survival in moral markets. This study examines how regional institutional logics—spatially bound, socially constructed meaning systems that legitimize specific practices and goals within a community—shape firm survival in emerging moral markets. Using a unique panel of firms entering the first eight years of the U.S. green building supply industry, we find that (1) a regional market logic amplifies the impacts of market forces by increasing the positive impact of market adoption and the negative impact of localized competition on firm survival, (2) a regional proenvironmental logic dampens the impacts of adoption and competition on firm survival, and (3) institutional complexity—the co-occurrence of both market and proenvironmental logics in a region—negates the traditional advantages of de alio (diversifying incumbent) firms, creating an opportunity for de novo (entrepreneurial entrant) firms to compete more effectively. Our study integrates research on industry emergence, institutional logics, and firm survival to address important gaps in our knowledge regarding the evolution and growth of environmental entrepreneurship in moral markets.
Funding: J. G. York thankfully acknowledges support from the Michael and Sherri Miske Faculty Research Award given by the Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado, Boulder.
... The fact that TSVs' similarities and differences with both SEs and high-tech ventures still lack a systematic exploration, together with the fact that social ventures are increasingly leveraging new technologies to reach their social impact objectives ( Vedula et al. 2021), make the analysis of TSVs as a unique entrepreneurial genre as both relevant and necessary. In this direction, different authors have called for further inquiry on the topic in order to explore the main characteristics of TSVs (Ismail, Sohel, and Ayuniza 2012), the differences with commercial enterprises (Desa and Kotha 2005), and their financing processes (Arena et al. 2018). ...
Technologies can play an important role in developing and scaling social innovations, thanks to their ability to reach and mobilise communities of people, use resources more effectively, and provide fast and broad responses to social needs. Seeing this potential, Technology Social Ventures have arisen as a form of social enterprises that employ technologies to achieve their social impact. This study has systematically reviewed the extant knowledge regarding Technology Social Ventures, applying a ‘micro-meso-macro’ framework to structure the analysis. The results from this multi-level approach revealed ten primary areas of inquiry on the topic, as well as showed that the research field is still in early development and has not been academically delineated from Social Enterprises. Based on these findings, the paper outlines a research agenda to address the existing gaps and advance the field’s development.
Current marketplace narratives demand a move from shareholder towards stakeholder primacy and responsible capitalism yielding social value creation. In parallel, the demand for entrepreneurial value creation at higher education institutions (including, but not limited to business schools) continues to grow. The intersection of these two demands, however, engenders critical tensions. While social value creation emphasizes stakeholder returns and a long-term perspective, entrepreneurial value creation revolves around investment returns and short-term agility. As a result, business schools have been grappling to find ways to incorporate a broader, holistic view on value creation into their activities. We bring together future studies and management scholars and scholarship to explore futures literacy as an instrumental capability for business schools. Our research suggests that an interdisciplinary approach is particularly promising since both management and futures studies investigate how to engage with uncertainty and chart more desirable futures. We illustrate the instrumental role of futures literacy and foresight with an educational program built at the intersection of entrepreneurial and social value creation and with anticipatory practices at its core. We suggest that anticipatory practices are currently underutilized in business schools’ curricula, outreach activities, and strategy making, and may be necessary to shape productive and constructive business schools of the future.
We studied individual psychological characteristics such as conformity and ecocentrism in Mexican artisans, and the effect these characteristics have on entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and environmental behavior (EB) in artisan family businesses in Oaxaca and Guanajuato, Mexico. The research model is empirically validated by partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM). We found that conformity is a value that positively affects EO and EB. In contrast, ecocentrism has a positive effect on EB, but not on EO. Our study highlights the importance of focusing on conformity as a characteristic of survival ventures. On the other hand, it is imperative to carry out research that incorporates the environmental dimension to characterize the sustainability aspect in survival ventures.
Through qualitative studies, we examine how sustainable entrepreneurs frame the positive and negative societal as well as environmental impacts created by their entrepreneurial activities. According to framing literature, entrepreneurs use framing as a communicative strategy to guide an audience's attention on selected features of their ventures. Based on in-depth interviews with ten sustainable ventures in southern India, we found that sustainable entrepreneurs highlight the positive sustainable impacts they strive to create. We show how sustainable entrepreneurs apply a variety of techniques to downplay their ventures' negative sustainability impacts. Our empirically grounded model illustrates how the salience of positive sustainability impacts and the downplay of negative sustainability impacts—in combination—leads entrepreneurs to articulate their sustainability impacts strongly biased in favor of positivity. Overall, this study provides new insights for a critical reflection of a positivity tendency in sustainable entrepreneurship. Our study, therefore, sheds light on a much-neglected issue in the sustainable entrepreneurship domain that must be taken into account when developing new methods for the sustainability impact assessments of young ventures.
Purpose
Business growth is one of the most studied areas over the years. However, with the current uncertainty and entrepreneurial dynamism it becomes relevant to consider new variables such as entrepreneurial skills and competencies that influence its development. Accordingly, this research refers to the impact that the individual's skills have on the entrepreneurial environment. For this purpose, a survey has been developed of employees of different organizations considering the variables of high degree of proactivity in the employees' attitude, entrepreneurial training, innovation, previous experience or risk aversion.
Design/methodology/approach
The research has been conducted through fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) and the result shows the differences between the combination of variables for business growth through the consideration of sales growth and profit.
Findings
The results of this research provide new insights that allow the development and boosting of business growth.
Originality/value
The main contribution of this work is to pay attention to the human team of startups and show the role that this has in their growth.
Environmental entrepreneurship is increasingly recognized as a means of solving pressing environmental problems; because of this, it is often perceived as an ethical variant of entrepreneurial activity. However, we argue that this perception is flawed since ethics is assumed (not explained) on the premise of its identification with green activities or environmental ideals and intentions. This paper examines this problem and addresses the question of how we can know when, and if, environmental entrepreneurship is ethical. As a solution, we adopt Paul Ricoeur's approach to ethics. We argue that the Ricoeurian ethics, with its focus on actions and relationships and its logic of hyperbolic generosity, provides a consistent ethical framework in which to develop our comprehension of ethics in the environmental entrepreneurship field. In particular, Ricoeur's ethical approach brings a distinctive trait to the ethics of environmental entrepreneurship through an other‐oriented disposition and a normative standard—to give without any expectations—that can be used to judge ethics in relational actions. The paper can also be of use to environmental entrepreneurs seeking a practical ethical guide that helps them in their decision making, and to policymakers committed with the promotion of responsible environmental businesses.
A growing body of scholarship studies the emergence of moral markets—sectors offering market-based solutions to social and environmental issues. To date, researchers have largely focused on the drivers of firm entry into these values-laden sectors. However, we know comparatively little about postentry dynamics or the determinants of firm survival in moral markets. This study examines how regional institutional logics—spatially bound, socially constructed meaning systems that legitimize specific practices and goals within a community—shape firm survival in emerging moral markets. Using a unique panel of firms entering the first eight years of the U.S. green building supply industry, we find that (1) a regional market logic amplifies the impacts of market forces by increasing the positive impact of market adoption and the negative impact of localized competition on firm survival, (2) a regional proenvironmental logic dampens the impacts of adoption and competition on firm survival, and (3) institutional complexity—the co-occurrence of both market and proenvironmental logics in a region—negates the traditional advantages of de alio (diversifying incumbent) firms, creating an opportunity for de novo (entrepreneurial entrant) firms to compete more effectively. Our study integrates research on industry emergence, institutional logics, and firm survival to address important gaps in our knowledge regarding the evolution and growth of environmental entrepreneurship in moral markets.
Funding: J. G. York thankfully acknowledges support from the Michael and Sherri Miske Faculty Research Award given by the Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado, Boulder.
Business sustainability scholars were quick to respond with thoughtful insights about the rapid onset of COVID‐19. They posted numerous editorials on the Academy of Management website, underscoring the importance for organizations to quickly meet the immediate needs of people in their communities, the importance of innovating products and services, and the need to not only manage short‐term risks, but also build long‐term resilience (Bansal, 2020).
The past decade has experienced a significant increase in the number of papers on the biology of entrepreneurship. This trend is aligned with the general interest in the biology of management studies as evidenced by the more than 300 articles already published (Nofal et al., 2018). It illustrates the progression of science along two dimensions. First is the drive to seek smaller units of analyses to identify the core mechanisms of action. Second is the opposing drive to seek larger units of analyses to identify general principles. These simultaneous processes move our understanding of social and natural phenomena closer to a unified theory. In this editorial, we reflect on how the biology of why, how, what, when, and where of entrepreneurship represents a natural progression from the institutional, organizational, and psychological explanations. We call this the biological perspective in entrepreneurship (BPE), which is illustrated by the papers in this volume. We examine the key domains of inquiry, various methodologies, and reflect on the directions that future research should take.
Research summary
Although the study of entrepreneurs' stress has encompassed nearly 40 years, the literature to date is marked by ambiguity, conflicting results, and the absence of a cohesive theoretical framework with which to describe stress phenomena. In response, the current investigation extends the challenge hindrance stressor framework to the context of entrepreneurship, testing how challenge and hindrance stressors impact entrepreneurs' well‐being and performance. Our meta‐analytic results show that challenge stressors enhance entrepreneurs' performance, but hindrance stressors harm entrepreneurs' well‐being. Additionally, comparison of our meta‐analytic results with findings on nonentrepreneurs suggests that entrepreneurs experience better outcomes from challenge and hindrance stressors than do nonentrepreneurs. Our findings have important implications for the utility of measuring and categorizing specific stressors and the value of individual‐level characteristics in coping with stressors.
Managerial summary
Entrepreneurs face many stressors as they start and run their ventures. However, prior research provides conflicting evidence regarding the impact of stressors on entrepreneurs and on the performance of their ventures. To address this conflicting evidence, we theorize that entrepreneurs' stressors can be categorized as either challenges (i.e., those that promote growth or mastery) or hindrances (i.e., those that promote loss or prevent mastery) and that each category of stressor differentially influences entrepreneurs' well‐being and venture performance. Using meta‐analysis, we found that challenge stressors increase performance whereas hindrance stressors had no significant effects on performance. Further, challenge stressors had no significant effects on well‐being, whereas hindrance stressors negatively affected well‐being. Finally, we identify important differences in these relationships between entrepreneurs and nonentrepreneurs.
Energy poverty is typically assessed using the energy expenditure-to-income ratio as a metric. This metric fails to account, though, for residents' demographics and regional variation in energy consumption. In the United States, policymakers dealing with energy poverty have faced challenges estimating the needs for energy-assistance programs. This study seeks to explore regional variations in energy poverty. Using Texas as the region of study, this work also explores differences in the populations captured via objective and subjective metrics (i.e., those who are unable to pay their bill and those who state they struggle to do so). Drawing on survey data, this work uses statistical analyses to (1) assess the regional variation of energy poverty defined as a ratio of household income spent on electricity bills, (2) determine if there is an association between objective and subjective metrics of energy poverty, and (3) identify statistical drivers of objective and subjective energy poverty metrics. Of respondents, 51% of objectively energy-burdened individuals indicated they struggled to pay electricity bills and 53% faced great stress due to the electricity bill. If policymakers can use metrics that are more accurate in capturing populations facing energy poverty, more effective energy poverty policies might be formulated.
We investigate how different types of environmental policies and new regional environmental knowledge affect new venture creation in and financing of green (low carbon), brown (fossil fuel) and gray (unrelated to natural resources) technologies across 24 OECD countries and 293 regions over the period 2001-13. We find that new regional environmental knowledge positively impacts new venture creation in green technologies, and moderately in gray industries. Gray industries also benefit from enhanced start-up financing in regions where new environmental knowledge is created, confirming that environmental knowledge creation yields positive externalities beyond the green sector. We also find that a more stringent environmental policy regime negatively impacts the creation of new ventures across sectors, but most prominently, it discourages new fossil fuel ventures. However, once entrepreneurs decide to start a new business, stringent environmental policies have on aggregate a positive effect on new venture financing across sectors, particularly through feed-in-tariffs and emission standards.
Entrepreneurs’ creativity is the starting point of opportunity identification, exploitation, and innovation, so it is generally lauded by journalists, citizen observers, practitioners, and scholars. However, they may overstate the benefits of creative entrepreneurs while neglecting their potential costs. Building on moral disengagement theory, we theorize that a creative mindset enables entrepreneurs to generate reasons to justify their potentially environment-destroying behaviors (i.e., nature disengagement), which in turn increases their favorability of potential opportunities that harm nature. We first developed and validated a scale for measuring nature disengagement and then conducted two randomized between-subject experiments with active entrepreneurs. The empirical results largely supported our theoretical model of the dark side of creativity in the entrepreneurship context.
Insufficiency of research and theory on the relationships between entrepreneurship and grand challenges means that we know little about who engages and what repertoires of actions they take to tackle socioenvironmental challenges that transcend firms, markets and nations, and what sorts of solutions they create. Drawing on the five articles featured in this symposium—and focusing especially on their protagonists or actors, the actions these actors take, and their achievements—we begin to conceptualize an impact entrepreneurship perspective. Following the e pluribus unum tenet (“out of many, one”) and adhering to the doctrine that diverse, decentralized human effort can ameliorate the world, our impact entrepreneurship perspective refers to the development of solutions to grand challenges, in a financially, socially and environmentally sustainable fashion. All in all, then, this symposium provides a starting point to discuss, conceptualize, study, interpret and enrich our understanding of impact entrepreneurship and collective action to address grand challenges.
There has been an increasing interest in science, technology and innovation policy studies in the topic of policy mixes. While earlier studies conceptualised policy mixes mainly in terms of combinations of instruments to support innovation, more recent literature extends the focus to how policy mixes can foster sustainability transitions. For this, broader policy mix conceptualisations have emerged which also include considerations of policy goals and policy strategies; policy mix characteristics such as consistency, coherence, credibility and comprehensiveness; as well as policy making and implementation processes. It is these broader conceptualisations of policy mixes which are the subject of the special issue introduced in this article. We aim at supporting the emergence of a new strand of interdisciplinary social science research on policy mixes which combines approaches, methods and insights from innovation and policy studies to further such broader policy mix research with a specific focus on fostering sustainability transitions. In this article we introduce this topic and present a bibliometric analysis of the literature on policy mixes in both fields as well as their emerging connections. We also introduce five major themes in the policy mix literature and summarise the contributions made by the articles in the special issue to these: methodological advances; policy making and implementation; actors and agency; evaluating policy mixes; and the co-evolution of policy mixes and socio-technical systems. We conclude by summarising key insights for policy making.
This paper introduces a new typology and associated measure of social and environmental mission integration (SEMI) by conceptually framing a feature of hybrid organizations—the degree of integration of their revenue model and social–environmental mission. The SEMI measure is illustrated using a hand-collected sample of 256 North American Certified B Corporations. We explore the heterogeneity of SEMI scores by identifying external-facing correlates and demonstrate non-congruence with Certified B Corporation’s audit results. Overall, our findings advance existing knowledge of these hybrid organizations and how they balance their social–environmental missions with their economic objectives.
Social entrepreneurship (SE) is often viewed as an effective means to promote social well-being (SWB). However, how SE emerges from a country’s institutional and social context, and consequently, how the institutional and social embeddedness of SE influences the level of SWB in a particular country, remains unanswered. This study, utilizing fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), addresses these questions by exploring, (1) the configurations of institutional and social capital conditions that lead to high prevalence rates of different types of SE activities in a country, and (2) the configurations of such institutionally and socially embedded SE activities that deliver high level of SWB in a country. It advances the SE literature by revealing the embeddedness and configurational nature of SE. Specifically, multiple equifinal configurations of socio-political conditions can lead to high prevalence rates of not-for-profit SE and hybrid SE. Moreover, this study finds that while both not-for-profit SE and hybrid SE can facilitate SWB by interacting with sociopolitical conditions, they do so through different mechanisms.
In this paper, we employ bibliometric analysis to empirically analyse the research on social entrepreneurship published between 1996 and 2017. By employing methods of citation analysis, document co-citation analysis, and social network analysis, we analyse 1296 papers containing 74,237 cited references and uncover the structure, or intellectual base, of research on social entrepreneurship. We identify nine distinct clusters of social entrepreneurship research that depict the intellectual structure of the field. The results provide an overall perspective of the social entrepreneurship field, identifying its influential works and analysing scholarly communication between these works. The results further aid in clarifying the overall centrality features of the social entrepreneurship research network. We also examine the integration of ethics into social entrepreneurship literature. We conclude with a discussion on the structure and evolution of the social entrepreneurship field.
Diffusion of environmentally beneficial practices is often portrayed as either the result of regulatory action or the heroic leadership of powerful actors within an industry. But, is this characterization accurate or universal? We assert that the transition toward environmentally beneficial practices within an industry is a journey that involves the contributions of numerous stakeholders. When there is no powerful central actor, we maintain that industries can still transition toward environmentally beneficial practices through multiple forms of collective and
entrepreneurial action. Drawing from entrepreneurship, sustainability, and institutional theories of change, we analyze and discuss the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standard for the commercial building industry. We present theory related to four phases of the
transition: 1) initiation of new practices through effectual entrepreneurship, 2) adoption of new practices through voluntary standards, 3) legitimation of new practices through framing, and 4) commercialization of new practices through new market entrants and alternatives. We advance a new perspective on the industry evolution toward more environmentally beneficial practices that illuminates how industry change may be institutionalized through the complementary actions undertaken by diverse actors.
In this essay, we critique the usage of the term ‘institutional void’ to characterize non-Western contexts in organizational studies. We explore how ‘conceptual stretching’ of institutional voids – specifically, the theoretical and geographic expansion of the concept – has led not only to poor construct clarity, but also pejorative labelling of non-Western countries. We argue that research using this term perpetuates an ethnocentric bias by deifying market development and overlooking the richness and power of informal and non-market institutions in shaping local economic activity. We call for an ‘epistemological rupture’ to decolonize organizational scholarship in non-Western settings and facilitate contextually grounded research approaches that allow for more indigenous theorization.
Entrepreneurship research typically emphasizes firm-level outcomes such as growth and performance. However, people pursue entrepreneurship for deeply personal, idiosyncratic reasons. Therefore, as in other self-organized human pursuits, how entrepreneurship relates to fulfillment and well-being is of utmost importance. In this paper, we provide an overview of the well-being concept, related research, and its connection to entrepreneurship. We define entrepreneurial well-being as the experience of satisfaction, positive affect, infrequent negative affect, and psychological functioning in relation to developing, starting, growing, and running an entrepreneurial venture. We explain this definition of entrepreneurial well-being and review significant developments in our field and the broader field of well-being. Highlights of social, technological and institutional trends illustrate key areas for future research that can enhance our understanding of these phenomena. The eight papers in this special issue focus on entrepreneurial well-being each offering a specific perspective on how scholars can theorize and study the antecedents and consequences of entrepreneurship related to well-being.
Entrepreneurship research has grown rapidly in its scope, rigor, and impact. By every measure, our field now enjoys considerable academic acceptance and legitimacy as a scholarly discipline. However, several forces around the globe are demanding greater attention to (and perhaps redefinition of) relevance. We discuss what relevance means, how the field can achieve it, and how to best communicate it to the diverse stakeholders of our field.
Entrepreneurship is multifaceted. The purpose of this review is to acknowledge and critically assess the many and varied dependent variables (DVs) of entrepreneurship over the last 17 years. By focusing exclusively on systematically reviewing entrepreneurship’s DVs, this paper maps out, classifies, and provides order to the phenomena that scholars consider part of this self-defined field of research. Using a systematic selection process and an inductive approach to categorization, we offer a meta-framework for organizing entrepreneurship’s DVs. Based on this meta-framework, entrepreneurship involves the (a) initiation, (b) engagement, and (c) performance of entrepreneurial endeavors embedded in (d) environmental conditions, in which an entrepreneurial endeavor is the investment of resources into the pursuit of a potential opportunity. For each category, we offer both a review of the different DVs and opportunities for future research.
Although the emergence of new industries is often attributed to state support, little is known about the conditions under which an emergent category of organizations comes to receive state support in the first place. We theorize how government support for a nascent industry is jointly determined by the industry’s internal features and external forces and test our arguments by analyzing feed-in tariff policies for the emergent solar photovoltaics (PV) industry in 28 European countries from 1987 to 2012. We find that feed-in tariffs—policies that incentivize renewable energy—were more likely in countries with greater numbers of solar PV producers and where the industry was more coherent, containing fewer producers coming from industries with a contrasting identity, such as fossil fuels. Further, we find that the concentration of the incumbent (rival) energy sector in a given country enhances the effect of the number of PV producers on government policy support, but only when the emerging industry has a coherent identity. Our results shed new light on the relationship between public policy and the emergence of an industry category, and they extend our understanding of how new industries can attain valuable state support while operating in seemingly hostile environments.
The starting premise of this paper is that business models can transform social reality—sometimes to an extreme. Then, building on the concept of “grand challenges,” we argue that such transformations can be either positive or negative in nature (or both)—even in the case of business models designed to improve value not only economically but environmentally and socially as well. To further our understanding of the negative aspects, we introduced two conceptual categories of business model: those for oppression or depletion and exclusionary ones. We further argue that bringing the notion of grand challenges center-stage highlights four elements that can contribute to emerging research and inform practice on transformational business models. These elements are: participatory forms of architecture; multivocal inscriptions; scaffolding; and proximity (understood as a caring concern for the “other”). They are central components of what we name transformational business models.
As the entrepreneurship discipline grows, it increasingly faces unique research challenges. Recently, ‘interactive, activity based, cognitively hot, compassionate, and prosocial’ approaches to the study of entrepreneurship have arisen to meet these challenges. This paper builds on recent discussions by emphasizing, in addition, the persistent value of economic foundations for a progressive research agenda in entrepreneurship. A realist economic perspective is both fundamental for entrepreneurship and complements newer research trends. It has also stood the test of time: economic questions relating to methodological individualism, uncertainty, judgment, opportunities, social motivations, and incentives have not only set the tone for past research, but continue to offer starting points and insights for contemporary work. This paper thus makes two contributions: first, it explains the relevance of each of these concepts for contemporary work in entrepreneurship studies, and second, it uses them to pose novel research questions. These questions complement the abovementioned emerging trends in entrepreneurship.
Sustainable entrepreneurship (SE) has attracted significant scholarly attention over the last decade. Given its rapid development and its multidisciplinary character, the SE literature is increasingly difficult to navigate. We combine two bibliometric approaches (i.e. co-citation analysis of references and bibliographic coupling of documents) with manual coding of documents to take stock of progress within the field, mapping out focal points as well as blind spots in the SE research agenda. We show how distinct subfields have formed around key ideas expressed in subsets of seminal papers, shedding light on the relational nature of knowledge creation-uncovering the characteristics, evolution and future trajectories of these subfields. We develop a future research agenda based on the developments of the overall field as well as the subfields of SE.
We review new venture creation process research in leading journals over the past 30 years, applying a broad view of “process.” While we find a rich and varied literature with significant quantitative and qualitative growth, the review reveals considerable room for future contributions in this important area of entrepreneurship research. In an agenda building on review results, exemplary articles, and theory development advice from other sources, we discuss several types of such future contributions. We hope that our efforts can inspire emerging scholars, colleagues, research leaders, and institutional actors to contribute to a bright future for this core domain of entrepreneurship research.
Social Entrepreneurship (SE) is a popular area of research and practice. An analysis of the existing literature reviews on SE reveals a dearth of studies classifying the existing SE literature into multiple research themes and further presenting popular and less popular research themes. With the aim of bridging this gap, this study presents a systematic review of 188 peer reviewed SSCI journal articles published in last decade. It presents an overview of recent SE research, classifying it in five main themes while identifying the thrust areas of research in each. Based on identified research gaps, we provide future research directions, contexts and methodology.
Entrepreneurship for sustainable development is a multilevel phenomenon connecting social, environmental and economic dimensions between entrepreneurial processes, market transformations, as well as large-scale societal developments. While previous articles on social, environmental, and sustainable entrepreneurship have advanced our understanding on processes of discovery, creation, and exploitation of sustainability-oriented opportunities, the links between contextual influences on venture development and transformational outcomes at multiple levels are only partially captured in extant frameworks. Drawing out causal mechanisms with a systematic review, this article proposes a multilevel framework for linking mechanisms in existing literature and proposing future research on entrepreneurship for sustainable development.
•We examine the relationship between a self-oriented motivator, status-striving, and social entrepreneurship intent.•Status-striving has a positive and significant relationship with social entrepreneurship intent.•The interaction between status-striving and empathy has a negative relationship on social entrepreneurship intent.•Results suggest that both self- and other-oriented motivators can influence social entrepreneurship intent.
Accelerating innovation in clean energy technologies is a policy priority for governments around the world aiming to mitigate climate change and to provide affordable energy. Most research has focused on the role of governments financing R&D and steering market demand, but there is a more limited understanding of the role of direct government interactions with startups across all sectors. We propose and evaluate the value-creation mechanisms of network resources from different types of partners for startups, highlighting the unique resources of government partners for cleantech startups. We develop and analyze a novel dataset of 657 U.S. cleantech startups and 2,015 alliances with governments, firms, research organizations, and not-for-profit organizations from 2008 to 2012 and analyze short-term firm outcomes from the different alliances. Our findings highlight the importance of governmental partners in technology development alliances to catalyze cleantech startup innovation (the patenting activity of cleantech startups increases by 73.7 percent with every additional governmental technology alliance when compared to those startups that did not engage in such alliances) and as quality signals to private sector investors for licensing alliances (private financing deals increase by 155 percent for every additional license from a government organization). Overall, these findings extend the alliance perspectives on innovation, contribute to the emerging research on entrepreneurial ecosystems, and underline the need to develop empirical evidence in different sectors.
Humanity has a limited window in which it can hope to avoid the worst effects of climate change, according to climate report. Humanity has a limited window in which it can hope to avoid the more dire effects of climate change, according to climate report.
International research collaboration (IRC) has been increasingly important as an emerging area of innovation studies. This study reviews the intellectual base, main research trajectories and intellectual communities of the IRC research domain over the period 1957–2015. It integrates qualitative review and three quantitative analyses including co-citation network analysis, main path analysis and bibliographic coupling analysis. The results show that the IRC research has gone through three phases, namely, “emergence” (1957–1991), “fermentation” (1992–2005) and “take-off” (2006–2015) phases. The co-citation network analysis confirms that the IRC research field has been developed under the influence of two pioneering studies related to bibliometrics research. The main research trajectories in IRC studies over the three development phases and over the whole period are identified based on the main path analysis, which shows that co-authorship analysis is the main research method in IRC studies. A bibliographic coupling analysis suggests that the whole IRC research domain can be classified into five distinct intellectual areas: drivers of IRC, IRC patterns, IRC effects, IRC networks and IRC measurement. Seven topics for future research are also identified.
The past decade has witnessed a surge of research interest in social entrepreneurship (SE). This has resulted in important insights concerning the role of SE in fostering inclusive growth and institutional change. However, the rapid growth of SE research, the emerging nature of the literature, and the fact that SE builds on different disciplines and fields (e.g., entrepreneurship, sociology, economics, ethics) have led to a rather fragmented literature without dominant frameworks. This situation risks leading to a duplication of efforts and hampers cumulative knowledge growth. Drawing on 395 peer-reviewed articles on SE, we (1) identify gaps in SE research on three levels of analysis (i.e., individual, organizational, institutional), (2) proffer an integrative multistage, multilevel framework, and (3) discuss promising avenues for further research on SE.
The aim of this Special Issue is to demonstrate how drawing on multidisciplinary insights from the literature on prosociality can broaden the individual-opportunity nexus to make room for a variety of actors. Five feature articles emphasize the collective level of the analysis, underscoring the social distance between the entrepreneurs and the different communities they serve. Leveraging construal level theory, we abductively derive an organizing framework that helps us articulate how stretching or compressing social distance can transform initial opportunities into occasions for serving the greater good. We identify two distinct mechanisms present in all five empirical studies that explain how the needs and hopes of many others may add creativity, consistency and connectivity to one's venture. We also connect these abductive insights with the two editorials that follow this introduction and nudge our collective attention towards the research opportunities awaiting our academic community once we begin to relax the egocentric reference point that, until recently, has defined the discipline of entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship is widely argued to be critical for alleviating extreme poverty. However, research on this topic is characterized by diverging perspectives regarding poverty alleviation and remains fragmented across various research domains. This review examines 77 leading academic journals over the period 1990 to 2017 and identifies over 200 articles on entrepreneurship and poverty alleviation. The analysis of these articles highlights three different underlying perspectives: poverty alleviation through entrepreneurship as remediation (actions that address immediate resource concerns), reform (actions leading to substantive institutional changes), and revolution (actions that change the underlying capitalist-based assumptions of business). The analysis of these articles leads to the development of extensive new insights and opportunities for future research.
Corporate environmental performance (CEP) is widely acknowledged as a multidimensional construct. The researchers in the field of ecology, environmental management, and sustainability studies have long faced the dilemma of how exactly to measure CEP, given the vast array of instruments available and the lack of an operational definition. Our aim was to propose a new conceptualization of CEP based on a comprehensive and critical review of three decades of dedicated research. First, in order to provide an operationalization of the multidimensional construct of CEP, several academic and industry-based CEP reporting inventories are reassembled into a large set of 140 indicators grouped into 14 functional categories, identified using the grounded theory approach. Second, the critical review proposes a classification and discussion of empirical contributions according to their data sources, based on the content analysis of 172 empirical papers (published between 1980 and 2017), using the variable “corporate environmental performance”. Third, we discuss the pros and cons of using certain types of CEP measures and we suggest relevant guidelines for researchers on how to choose the adequate instruments which maximize both the reliability of data sources and the construct validity of CEP measures. Fourth, a new definition of CEP highlights the pivotal concept of environmental impact and the corporate goal of reducing and preventing environmental harm. Finally, we discuss the future of CEP research, given the opportunity and necessity for a more relevant and dimensional approach to measurement.
Certified B Corporations are ventures that have chosen to embrace third party voluntary social and environmental audits conducted by an entrepreneurial non-profit enterprise called B Lab. In this special issue, we focus on the lifecycle of Certified B Corporations and its relation to the entrepreneurial journey. We highlight research at the intersection of opportunities and prosocial certification to identify patterns and processes which add significant value to ongoing conversations in the field of entrepreneurship while charting new research pathways. We develop a framework of prosocial venturing and certification that pinpoints several elements of likely consequence and curiosity. This offers new insights about the entrepreneurial process that hint at the importance of opportunity, identity metamorphosis and sedimentation/superseding work. We thereby interpret how the exploration of prosociality may add to conversations on how and why ventures resist or embrace change over time, to what effect and ultimately, how opportunities may be reBorn.
Empathy is a key trait distinguishing social entrepreneurs from traditional entrepreneurs, and an important antecedent of social entrepreneurial (SE) intentions. Yet, little research explains the mechanisms through which empathy motivates SE intentions. We argue that studying the link between the prosocial trait of empathy and the prosocial outcome of SE intentions requires a prosocial lens that traditional entrepreneurial intent theories cannot offer. Building on prosocial motives research, we propose that empathy explains SE intentions through two complementary mechanisms: self-efficacy (an agentic mechanism), and social worth (a communal mechanism). We find support for our hypotheses in a study of 281 university students.
In this innovative book, Laura E. Huggins finds path breaking entrepreneurial solutions to difficult environmental challenges in some of the world’s poorest areas. The approaches entrepreneurs are taking to these challenges involve establishing property rights and encouraging market exchange. From beehives to barbed wire, these tools are creating positive incentives and promoting both economic development and environmental improvements. The case studies are from the developing world and reveal where the biggest victories for less poverty and more conservation can be won. The pursuit begins by learning from local people solving local problems.
More than a decade ago, Low and MacMillan identified three elements indispensable to an understanding of entrepreneurial success: process, context, and outcomes. Since their critique, three important advances include (a) a shift in theoretical emphasis from the characteristics of entrepreneurs as individuals to the consequences of their actions, (b) a deeper understanding of how entrepreneurs use knowledge, networks, and resources to construct firms, and (c) a more sophisticated taxonomy of environmental forces at different levels of analysis (population, community, and society) that affect entrepreneurship. Although our knowledge of entrepreneurial activities has increased dramatically, we still have much to learn about how process and context interact to shape the outcome of entrepreneurial efforts. From an evolutionary approach, process and context (strategy and environment) interact in a recursive continuous process, driving the fate of entrepreneurial efforts. Thus, integrating context and process into research designs remains a major challenge. Such integration constitutes a necessary step to a more complete evolutionary approach and a better understanding of entrepreneurial success.
Social entrepreneurship (SE) research has advanced understanding of the dynamics and processes underlying positive social change. Yet only scant attention has been paid to where that change happens. We suggest that a community level of analysis is essential for understanding the extra-organizational settings implied by the “social” in “social entrepreneurship.” We adopt a UNESCO-inspired community typology including geographical communities, communities of interest or solidarity, communities of identity, and intentional communities as an organizing framework. Relying on a wealth creation perspective, we evaluate the social change that takes place by assessing four different types of capital created within communities—physical capital, financial capital, human capital, and social capital. Based on a review of 57 peer-reviewed journals and 8 leading case study outlets, we find that examples of all four community types and all four capital types are evident in the SE literature. We discuss the implications of the community as a locus of SE activity and capital as an indicator of social impact in future research.
Organizations increasingly grapple with hybridity—the combination of identities, forms, logics, or other core elements that would conventionally not go together. Drawing on in-depth longitudinal data from the first ten years of a successful social enterprise—Digital Divide Data, founded in Cambodia—we induce an empirically grounded model of sustaining hybridity over time through structured flexibility: the interaction of stable organizational features and adaptive enactment processes. We identify two stable features—paradoxical frames, involving leaders’ cognitive understandings of the two sides of a hybrid as both contradictory and interdependent, and guardrails, consisting of formal structures, leadership expertise, and stakeholder relationships associated with each side—that together facilitate ongoing adaptation in the meanings and practices of dual elements, sustaining both elements over time. Our structured flexibility model reorients research away from focusing on either stable or adaptive approaches to sustaining hybridity toward understanding their interaction, with implications for scholarship on hybridity, duality, and adaptation more broadly.
Dazed and confused by the wild hype surrounding gazelles and unicorns, entrepreneurship researchers have focused on the black swans of the entrepreneurial world, even though IPOs and venture capital financing of firms are extremely rare events. Despite their rarity, entrepreneurship conferences and journals have been filled with papers on various aspects of the process of “going public” and “VC networks.” Fortunately, in the middle of the Silicon Valley mania, other scholars have been paying attention to the mundane aspects of business startups – – the ordinary business starts, numbering in the hundreds of thousands each year in the United States for businesses with employees. We point out what we believe to be scholars’ misplaced attention to the extreme and their corresponding neglect of the mundane. Correcting the misperception that has been introduced into the literature by selection biases favoring growing and profitable firms will give scholars and policymakers a more accurate and policy-relevant picture of entrepreneurship in the 21st century.