Doing Business in Europe by Alina Mihaela Dima

Author:Alina Mihaela Dima
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

2 Social Entrepreneurship: Key Concepts and Theories

Social entrepreneurship is often connected with the personality and ambitious ideals of successful heroic entrepreneurs and not defined per se, but sometimes compared to and differentiated from traditional, commercial entrepreneurship (Agoston 2014a; Dacin et al. 2011; Dufays and Huybrechts 2014). Possibly the main difference between social and commercial entrepreneurs resides in the motivation of the founders. While commercial entrepreneurs are motivated mainly by the perspective of achieving monetary gain, social entrepreneurs engage in fields of activity where they can have a positive social impact while addressing social problems. They engage in such fields as education, health, culture, environment, human rights and, poverty alleviation, which do not promise large profit margins. Their motivation can be seen as diverse, directed at social responsibility and ethical impetus, and characterized by the willingness to share credit and cross disciplinary boundaries (Blank 2012; Bornstein 2004; Harbrecht 2010).

The social entrepreneur by Bosma et al. (2015) is portrayed as a highly educated individual. Across Europe he is a predominantly male, young change maker between 18 and 34 years of age and tends to have lower household incomes as compared to commercial entrepreneurs. According to Huybrechts and Nicholls (2012) social entrepreneurship is not a discrete sector, not a synonym for social business, not a new form of Corporate Social Responsibility, not the only model for social innovation . There are also voices which state that in an “ideal and moral” society there should be no clear cut distinction between social and commercial entrepreneurship, as the general purpose of businesses should consist in creation of social value and increase of quality of life in general (Musa 2017). Therefore, this distinction should slowly vanish and social entrepreneurship should become the main stream. Whether supporters of social entrepreneurship that embrace these views are visionaries or just naive idealists, only the future can tell. Additionally, corporate social entrepreneurship is a concept closely linked to social entrepreneurship and it can be used as a framework of analysis for the activities of corporations and as a business development strategy in order bring value to society by increasing local development, creating transformational innovation and finding new markets (Hadad 2015).

The field of research is still in a theory building phase, social entrepreneurship searches for its identity; its conceptual boundaries have not been reached yet and no unitary definition is widely accepted (Andersson and Ford 2015; Bacq and Janssen 2011; Dacin et al. 2010; Short et al. 2009; Zahra et al. 2009; Gauca and Hadad 2013). On the other hand, it seems that social entrepreneurship theory lags behind its practice and the theoretical advancement faces impediments (Dacin et al. 2010; Mueller et al. 2015; Santos 2012).

According to Huybrechts and Nicholls (2012), among the main drivers of social entrepreneurship we can find: (1) major changes in socioeconomic, political and cultural contexts across the world, (2) the rise of global connectedness and the rise of social media that foster better interactions between the social entrepreneurs, (3) the redefinition of the role of the

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