Social Issues

Corporate social entrepreneurship (CSE) is a subject of growing interest for scholars in the areas of corporate entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, and corporate social responsibility as it has the potential of engaging corporations in activities that transform traditional practices, advance corporate purpose, and promote positive social change. CSE consists of identifying, evaluating, and exploiting entrepreneurial opportunities that address social and environmental problems through market means from within corporations. Dual value creation—the simultaneous pursuit of social and economic value creation—is a core element of CSE, however, in organizations that have not been originally designed for this purpose. As an umbrella concept, CSE embraces similar terms such as social intrapreneurship and sustainable corporate entrepreneurship. CSE often starts autonomously through managers and employees acting as social intrapreneurs, until initiatives are accepted and integrated into the firm’s concept of strategy. CSE introduces a societal concern to corporate entrepreneurship, contextualizes social entrepreneurship in corporations, and advances entrepreneurial approaches to corporate social responsibility—all of which are topics that remain relatively unexplored and that offer vibrant opportunities for future research.

Poverty is more than a lack of money or an inability to afford basic necessities. It is an experience that is multidimensional and includes challenges related to literacy, health, food security, housing, transportation, safety, fatigue, underemployment, limited social networks, and limited access to many opportunities available to those in other income categories. Poverty is a pernicious global problem with unacceptably high levels persisting in spite of trillions of dollars of annual spending by governments and other organizations. While this kind of investment represents a critical lifeline to many individuals and families, it is not moving enough of them out of poverty. As a result, there is a need to explore alternative solutions and approaches. Entrepreneurship, or the creation of businesses, by those experiencing poverty is one potential pathway to a better life. Yet it is a pathway about which we understand relatively little. While the poverty–entrepreneurship interface has received growing attention from scholars over the past few years, very little theoretical or conceptual work has been done. More critically, there is scant empirical evidence on such basic questions as the rate of business creation by those in poverty, success and sustainability rates, key success factors, the role of institutions and entrepreneurial ecosystems in venture outcomes, and much more. The unique difficulties faced by these entrepreneurs can be captured through the liability of poorness, a concept which includes gaps in five types of literacy, a scarcity or short-term orientation, severe nonbusiness distractions, and the lack of any safety net. As a result, the ventures that are created tend to be survival businesses that are labor intensive, with low margins, little differentiation, no bargaining power with suppliers or customers, lack of equipment and technology, and limited capacity. These are fragile enterprises, suggesting the priority may not simply be fostering higher levels of start-up activity among the poor, but interventions that enable them to become sustainable. A beginning point in realizing the potential of entrepreneurship as a poverty alleviation tool is the development of new insights on expanding opportunity horizons of these individuals, helping them escape the commodity trap, rethinking resourcing and microcredit, and assisting with adoption of the entrepreneurial mindset.

A company’s social purpose has become a key factor that should be considered in organizational design and strategic decision-making. For-purpose enterprises are for-profit, financially self-sustained organizations that embed a social aim as one of their main objectives. Companies that simultaneously must envisage a double purpose, namely, social and competitive, face an even greater complexity, that is, a likely risk of internal logics’ tensions and structural drifts. Scholars have proposed different theoretical and operative frameworks; on the one hand, they describe ad hoc business models to foster synergies between the social impact and economic and competitive-oriented actions. On the other hand, they also try to focus on an organization’s governance, suggesting incentive schemes and organizational designs that could smooth trade-offs and tensions, which could jeopardize a company’s viability. Following scholars have differentiated two clusters of studies: (a) instrumental–strategic–economic stream and (b) injunctive–social–behavioral. The first approach perceives as critical the balance between social-oriented aims and profit with a viable business model. Under this perspective, the concept of synergies between the two aims is critical. Its mainstream framework is the stakeholder theory approach while recent approaches, rooted especially in marketing and strategic human capital studies, bring to the central stage how corporate social responsible actions develop social identity processes with focal stakeholders, which are responsible for reciprocity behaviors. These different perspectives, although complementary, could imply significant differences for the organization design, product strategy, and the role and power of the chief sustainability officer as well as allocation of resources and capabilities. The second group of studies—injunctive–social–behavioral—is focused on understanding how to maintain active social aims under economic and competitive constrains. These works are particularly focused in investigating the intrinsic motivations of doing good and the type of tensions that could arise in organizations with a social mission. The works analyze the potential drifts, risks, and solutions that could mitigate tension and trade-offs. In this stream, the first line of work is related to social entrepreneurship, especially in developing countries, while the second is more focused on human-resource incentive schemes and organizational designs that preserve a company’s social goals under economic constrains.

Institutional logics shape how actors interpret and organize their environment. Institutional logics include society’s structural, normative, and symbolic influences that provide organizations and individuals with norms, values, assumptions, and rules that guide decision-making and action. While institutional logics influence individuals and organizations, they do not exist/form in a vacuum, but rather are instantiated in the practices and patterned behaviors of actors who act as carriers of logics in specific contexts. Given the dynamic interaction between institutional logics and individual/organizational actors, research has begun to explore the micro-level processes that influence institutional logic changes to help explain how and why those who are shaped by an institution enact changes in the very context in which they are embedded. Thus, the formation and changing of institutional logics involve precipitating action—which can include entrepreneurial action. Entrepreneurial action—especially in moments of crisis (e.g., when there is a disruptive event, natural disaster, or external feature that disturbs the status quo), can function as a micro-foundation for institutional logic shifts. An entrepreneurship model of dominant logic shifts therefore reveals how crises induce sensemaking activities that can influence shifts in how actor’s see the world, which in turn motivates the pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities. Significant disruptions, such as environmental jolts, have a triggering effect in enabling individuals to problematize previously held beliefs and logics, allowing them to temporarily “step out of” status quo institutional logics. With prior beliefs and logics problematized, individual decision-makers become open to seeing new interpretations of their surroundings as it is and as it could be. Therefore, actors shift their dominant way of seeing the world (e.g., dominant logic) and then enact this new logic through ventures that, ultimately, can shift and alter institutional-level logics. Therefore, an entrepreneurship model of dominant logic shifts serves as an explanation for how broader institutional logics may shift as a result of the interaction between entrepreneurial action and the environment following a major disruption.

Social entrepreneurship is an ever-growing and ever-changing field. Known as the process of identifying, evaluating, and exploiting opportunities aiming at social value creation by means of commercial, market-based activities and of the use of a wide range of resources, social entrepreneurship combines market elements with a societal purpose. An overview of the evolution of social entrepreneurship as a field of research from its origins in the 1980s to date, and analysis of the themes presented at The Annual Social Entrepreneurship Conference over more than a decade, show how the core components of social entrepreneurship remained as the field evolved—social value creation, business model, and social entrepreneurial intentions, with the addition of nuances and complexities over time. These trends demonstrate the importance—and unique opportunities—for social entrepreneurship researchers to pursue further research on scaling, impact measurement, and systems change. Social entrepreneurship bears the promise and potential to revisit, and potentially challenge, the theoretical assumptions made in traditional entrepreneurship and management scholarship, embracing a multiplicity of salient stakeholders, other levels of analysis, or the relevance of community.