Understanding and measuring social entrepreneurship

Abstract

This thesis aims to understand the phenomenon of social entrepreneurship and measure its component dimensions. In particular, the thesis addresses two research gaps in the social entrepreneurship research. The first gap addressed is the resource mobilization during marketing strategy development of a social enterprise in its start-up stage. Social entrepreneurship is a diverse concept constituting various organizational form and activities. Hence, the second research gap that this research study addresses is the issue of measurement of social entrepreneurship construct. The thesis consists of an introductory essay and five research articles. The first two articles in this compilation address the first research question. The research question of how to address the resource constraints in marketing strategy development of social enterprise is addressed with a case study of a social start up delivering health care in rural India. The data consist of interviews, email discussions, online discussion forums and student reports collected over a period of two years. The results of the first paper advance the teaching methodology of live case for teaching students to solve problems of social businesses. The results of the second study revealed that the network bricolage and entrepreneurship education bricolage were used as two mechanisms to address resource shortage while developing marketing strategy of the health venture. The results from the study advances knowledge of the development of marketing strategies in a social enterprise. The study also contributes to the field of social entrepreneurship education and social enterprise resource acquisition. The final three articles in the compilation address the second research gap. To address the measurement question, the data was collected from mature social enterprises from six European countries and students developing business plans for nascent social enterprises using three rounds of data collection. The third article in this compilation presents a pilot study of scale development using a sample of 178 Nordic social enterprises. This study identified six constructs associated with social enterprises: creation of market disequilibria, open source sharing of knowledge, earned income generation, limited profit distribution, employee compensation, and autonomy in operation. The fourth article tests six hypotheses based on 245 mature social enterprises and 441 nascent social enterprises. This study identified how the conflicting components of social innovation and earned income in a social entrepreneurial organization affect the outcomes of the perceived social impact and fundability of organizations pursuing social entrepreneurship. The fifth article presents a second study of scale development with a larger sample of 263 mature social enterprises and 184 nascent social enterprises. Based on the study we developed the concept of Organizational social entrepreneurship as a construct that can occur in various types of social organizations. Organizational social entrepreneurship was conceptualized as a formative construct consisting of the dimensions of social innovation, earned income and governance. The study developed scale items to measure each of these components. The study has important implications for policy makers and governments interested in identifying and measuring performance of social enterprises. It also presents a pioneering study which develops a scale for conceptualizing and measuring organizational social entrepreneurship. The scale developed will further future quantitative studies in the field of social entrepreneurship.