Now that we know what social entrepreneurship broadly means, let’s take a look at the defining and differentiating features of social enterprise or social entrepreneurial ventures (SEVs) by comparing it with traditional for-profit corporate entrepreneurial ventures (CEVs) and non-profit organizations (NPOs). For a detailed analysis of these dimensions, please read the full journal article.
Defining and differentiating features of social entrepreneurial ventures: Antecedent conditions
Conditions of origin
When commercial entrepreneurs look for an opportunity to create and satisfy new needs (and wants), they need a growing market size and growing market demand to create economic value (profit). Whereas social entrepreneurs focus on serving basic and long-standing socio-environmental needs. A recognized social needs, market failure, and repeated unsuccessful attempts to address socio-environmental problems are reasons enough to pursue the social goal to create social value and start an organization.
Characteristics of social entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurial ventures
Entrepreneurial credibility is vital for social entrepreneurs to be able to tap into their social networks to garner and mobilize resources. Social entrepreneurs not only have the unique ability to recognize the complexities inherent socio-environmental problems but they are also adept at bounding the social problem in a new way that raises public awareness of the problem through their vision. This ability helps them to assemble and effectively utilize many resources. It also helps in maximizing others’ commitment to the collective purpose.
Leadership: Since social entrepreneurs are engaged in creating systematic change, they need to motivate people to achieve transcendent or end values such as liberty, social justice, and equality. Transformational leaders achieve this by aligning the personal purpose of the employees to the organizational pursue. Such leaders inspire staff and members to put aside personal self-interest for the common good of the organization and to have confidence in their ability to achieve the “extraordinary” challenges before them. This creates an organizational culture that is conducive to engagement. This is an important aspect as commitment to collective purpose is a prerequisite for collective action. It also increases the sense of psychological ownership and feeling of value-added participation among collaborators, employees, community, and volunteers.
Since the goal of SEVs is to create transformational change, change needs to happen at multiple levels. That is, SEVs understand that successful resolution of long-standing social problems demands action by multiple actors on multiple levels and by multiple means and over a substantial period of time. Thus, decision making power is much more distributed, based on expertise rather than status (organic structure), as SEVs rely on collective wisdom, the experience of the community, employees as well as partners, and understand the importance of the collaborative capacity building. That means SEVs are inclusive as community ownership is a necessary condition for building collaborative capacity. By being inclusive means, that social value generation can happen inside or outside of the organizational boundary. That is, SEVs encourage the sharing of ideas, innovations, best practices, and organizational knowledge.
Outcome
Social entrepreneurs generally try to strike a balance between social and economic value creation through an innovative, visionary approach towards addressing the social problem. At the same time, the social mission is what drives their decision making and strategy. Hence social value creation is the primary motive for SEVs existence and not contingent upon profit-making ability. The figure below represents the defining and differentiating feature of SEVs.
Bibliography
Burns, J. M. (1978). Leadership. New York, NY: Harper & Row.
Trivedi, C., & Stokols, D. (2011). Social enterprises and corporate enterprises: Fundamental differences and defining features Journal of Entrepreneurship, 20(1), 1-32. doi:10.1177/097135571002000101
Waddock, S.A., & Post, J.E. (1991). Social entrepreneurs and catalytic change. Public Administration Review, 51(5), 393–401.
Cite this article (APA)
Trivedi, C. (2020, December 2). Defining and differentiating features of social entrepreneurial ventures. ConceptsHacked.
