Editorial Paper. Social Entrepreneurship and Social Enterprise Phenomenon: Antecedents, Processes, Impact across Cultures and Contexts
Editorial Paper. Social Entrepreneurship and Social Enterprise Phenomenon: Antecedents, Processes, Impact across Cultures and Contexts

Summary/Abstract: Social entrepreneurship3, as a field of research, has gained enormous interest of academics in management and entrepreneurship literature for almost 30 years now. Also, scholars in other intellectual domains like economics, finance, marketing, political science, sociology and few others, have found it fascinating. As a term, it is common in public discourses and has found interest among policy makers, corporations, media, different groups of practitioners and professionals. As a phenomenon it is not new, although the SE term has been only recently coined (Banks, 1972; Drucker, 1979). For far more than two centuries great individuals and groups have tried to tackle the societal challenges, using economic means, such as the Rochdale Pioneers who inspired cooperative ideals, and Florence Nightingale – an English nurse and social activist, who changed the patient care landscape (Nicholls, 2006). Many of the ventures and actions of social initiatives can be traced to the earlier, medieval or even ancient times. Today, social initiatives and social enterprise have emerged in particular countries and regions as a result of their historical institutional trajectories, and “social enterprise landscape ZOO” (Young & Brewer, 2016) has become very heterogeneous. The interest of management and entrepreneurship research into the phenomenon has resulted in an unprecedented increase in scholarly output. The historical analysis of SE research (Moss, Lumpkin & Short, 2017) published in key journals and databases shows an increase from one paper to 45 papers published per year between 1990 and 2010. SE centers established in universities like Oxford, Harvard and Cambridge have designed degree programmes, dedicated textbooks, and separate SE conferences, special journals like Social Enterprise Journal, Journal of Social Entrepreneurship and many more have been introduced for educational and publication purposes. SE has become popular as a response to the inabilities of governments and business to solve pressing social problems, including poverty, social exclusion, and environmental issues. All of the above are manifested in the diversity of different SE initiatives. Thus, we express our interest to explain and predict SE and social enterprise as phenomena, to identify related antecedents and outcomes, but also to look into the box of SE processes. This special issue attempts to respond to this interest. Diverse methodological approaches including descriptive, explanatory or exploratory ones are included in the papers in this issue. SE phenomenon is studied on an individual, organizational, and even a macro level. Different data is employed: current or archival data, primary or secondary, referring to different country settings such as Taiwan, Poland, Italy and England. Through the inclusion of such diverse perspectives and context, this issue works as a holistic approach to the phenomenon under analysis. In the following sections of this paper, we first provide a succinct overview of SE as a phenomenon and research field. We summarize the definitional debate and point to valuable theoretical frameworks for studying SE. Next, we introduce individual authors’ contributions to the issue and, finally, we propose further suggestions for future research.

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