This chapter has defined social entrepreneurship as a dynamic process, in which ventures that use a business process combine resources in new or different ways to meet unmet needs and catalyse social change, thereby solving difficult problems and creating economic value for the venture, and social value for society. In doing so, it has described the core features of social entrepreneurship. The most important of these features are a focus on a social mission supported by a business process, an emphasis on innovation, and in particular social innovation, to meet social needs, and how social entrepreneurship can manifest itself in a range of different organisation types, depending on the emphasis these organisations place upon their dual social and economic missions.
This chapter has also reviewed the main trajectories of social entrepreneurship research, and how scholars have theorised about social entrepreneurship. While social entrepreneur- ship research has grown rapidly, scholars have found it difficult to define what social en- trepreneurship is (Nicholls,2010b). The difficulty with defining social entrepreneurship has led scholars such as Choi and Majumdar to suggest studying its component concepts, including the social entrepreneur, SEVs’ orientation to the market, social value creation, social innovation and a variety of organisational forms. These concepts are themselves highly contested, invoking debates about ethics, politics and what the difference is, if any, between commercial and social entrepreneurship ventures.
Uncertainty about what social entrepreneurship is also explains why social en- trepreneurship research has been highly fragmented. For at least a decade, social en- trepreneurship was suggested to be in a pre-paradigmatic state (Nicholls,2010b, p. 611ff). Social entrepreneurship research does not have a home in any particular discipline, and so scholars have bridged different disciplines to study it. The inter-disciplinary approach to research has made it difficult for scholars to develop, ‘an empirically derived, coherent the-
oretical framework’ for studying social entrepreneurship (Johnson,2000; Weerawardena
and Mort,2006, p. 25). The lack of a common framework has also hindered empirical re-
search about the ‘antecedents and consequences of social entrepreneurship’ (Short et al.,
2009, p. 162).
Given the promise and potential of social entrepreneurship to solve difficult problems, it should be studied in a way that can either demonstrate its potential or reveal its limi- tations (Pärenson,2011). If social entrepreneurship, either by the decision of scholars or
its complex nature, defies universal definition, perhaps general definitions should be pre- ferred. These might combine the processes—that is, how ventures deal with problems or needs—and outcomes of social entrepreneurship—that is, the solution, in terms of a good or service, the reconfiguration of markets or wholesale systemic change (de Bruin & Stangl,2014, pp. 155–6). This approach to defining social entrepreneurship could help to reconcile various forms of social innovation and social entrepreneurship activities. The in- novations which SEVs use can be both a means to an end, and the end itself. Further, this approach implies that SEVs are most likely to have a deep impact on institutional struc- tures or processes when they can scale up and/or diffuse their innovations. The following chapter examines further how SEVs are thought to create value and have an impact.
3
A framework for evaluating social
entrepreneurship ventures
3.1 Introduction
A lesson from the previous chapter is that researchers should not be too concerned about searching for universal definitions of social entrepreneurship. As Newbert and Hill (2014, p. 245) note, the habit of trying to come up with more inclusive definitions has only rein- forced an ‘immense tent’ problem (R. L. Martin & Osberg,2007). Instead, scholars could study the range of socially-beneficial activities that make up social entrepreneurship.
To do so, scholars could draw on theories of social entrepreneurship as well as existing theories of entrepreneurship, innovation and economic and human development to help evaluate whether SEVs achieve what they intend. (Swedberg,2006, p. 26; Mueller et al.,
2015, p. 247; cf. Davis and Marquis,2005; Hedstrom and Swedberg,1998; Mair,2010). De- termining whether SEVs achieve their goals can also be a way of evaluating whether SEVs are as effective as their advocates claim, in terms of outputs and outcomes. Such an ap-
proach might help to improve the range, and kind, of social entrepreneurship research, by enabling more systematic hypothesis-testing research to be done, especially using quanti- tative methods.
Conducting more hypothesis-testing research is a priority. Hoogendoorn and other’s (2010) review of empirical social entrepreneurship research in 2,000 social science journals indicates how little knowledge there is about the impact of SEVs, as 87% of the studies reviewed were qualitative, and only two had conducted some type of hypothesis-testing. While case studies have helped provide rich, contextual accounts of social entrepreneur- ship, their predominance has contributed to the fragmented understanding of social en- trepreneurship (T. L. Hill et al.,2010, p. 6; Short et al.,2009). Hoogendoorn and others (2010, p. 23, 28) concluded that social entrepreneurship research requires more ‘rigorous empirical assessments to evolve’ because such research might provide useful information about failure or insignificant outcomes, as well as success.
One avenue is for scholars to investigate how social entrepreneurs solve problems by helping their beneficiaries to develop new combinations of human capabilities (Ziegler,
2010). By creating innovations, some social entrepreneurs provide their beneficiaries with the skills or resources which they need to develop as people, so that they can meaningfully participate in the world.
This chapter discusses the theories used to help frame an empirical evaluation of PSKH sponsors’ schools along these lines. It begins by describing a holistic framework of value creation. The premise is SEVs’ primary objective is to create returns to society by improv- ing people’s wellbeing. This is followed by a discussion of how social entrepreneurial inno- vation can contribute to human development, and how human development is a concept that can tie together the economic and social objectives of social entrepreneurship. Next, to ground these abstract concepts in the practical concerns of evaluation, the sorts of out- puts and outcomes that might be expected over certain time frames are discussed, in terms of ‘productive’, ‘unproductive’ and ‘destructive’ effects. The final section ties together the concepts and theory presented so far, by describing how the different aspects of social en- trepreneurship work together to create value, through the activities of value generation, value capture and value sharing, organised around a value proposition. With an under- standing of what the value is that SEVs might plan to create, and how they may do so, it is possible to evaluate whether SEVs deliver the benefits they intend (R. L. Martin & Osberg,