Unpacking the Biographical Antecedents of the Emergence of Social Enterprises: A Narrative Perspective

Abstract

Abstract Despite the burgeoning research on social enterprise (SE), there is a dearth of research that investigates the biographical factors that influence the emergence of SEs in the form of hybrid organizations on a large scale. Drawing on the emerging narrative perspective of SE, we examine the biographical narratives of 317 self-identified social entrepreneurs who were selected as fellows by two of the world’s largest SE support organizations: Ashoka and the Schwab Foundation. We employ Gioia’s methodology and principal component analysis to derive and subsequently classify the biographical antecedents of SE emergence. This study makes a novel contribution to the SE-as-hybrid-organization literature by revealing eight biographical antecedents of SE emergence, four of which can be categorized into social skills , and four others can be categorized into economic skills , which constitute SE’s social position. We also develop a typology of SE based on different combinations of individuals’ social skills and social position. Finally, we discuss the implications of this study for the SE-as-hybrid-organization literature, highlight its limitations, and present possible avenues for future research.