Different types of social entrepreneurship: The role of geography and embeddedness on the measurement and scaling of social value

TLDR

The diversity of organizations labeled as social entrepreneurship is expanding, posing a challenge for the field to build a scientific knowledge base. To address this issue, we build upon a typology of social entrepreneurship to theorize how the role of “sites and spaces” influences the process, explaining how geographic focus shapes embedded social networks and proposing that structural embeddedness affects the measurement and scaling of social value. We develop propositions linking geographic focus and structural embeddedness to the measurement and scaling of social value, drawing on a typology of social entrepreneurship and embeddedness logic.

Abstract

With its continued emergence in both academic and practitioner communities, the diversity of organizations categorized as social entrepreneurship continues to expand. The increasing diversity represents a challenge to the field as it attempts to build a scientific base of knowledge. To address this issue, we build upon a typology of different forms of social entrepreneurship to theorize about how the role of 'sites and spaces' may affect the social entrepreneurial process. Specifically, we explain how variance in the geographic focus of different types of social entrepreneurship influences the types of social networks in which social entrepreneurship is embedded. Drawing upon this logic of embeddedness, we develop propositions about how the structural embeddedness of social entrepreneurship may affect the measurement and scaling of social value. The purpose of this article is to add to the relatively sparse but growing theoretical foundation of the field of social entrepreneurship.