African data can bring fresh insights to management and social entrepreneurship studies
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In recent times social entrepreneurship has proliferated globally, yet research into the phenomenon still lags behind its practice, particularly in the developing world, and especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. In this blog post, we discuss what we know, what we don’t, and what we can learn from studying social entrepreneurship in Sub-Saharan Africa. Our research: a) highlights the important role of the environment in informing social entrepreneurship and its varied manifestations globally; b) provides insights on the nature of social entrepreneurship and enterprises in Sub-Saharan Africa; and c) shows that African data can provide insights for wider understanding of social entrepreneurship.Keywords:
Social Entrepreneurship
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Social Innovation
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Abstract The interplay between health, entrepreneurship and small and emerging businesses is a research field receiving growing interest. Studies point to both health-related risks and opportunities, which have implications for the social and economic lives of entrepreneurs and employees in small and new firms. Research has been carried out in different disciplines, which have contributed in different ways to the understanding of this inquiry. As the field is still premature and interdisciplinary in nature, there is a need to establish boundary-crossing avenues for developing new knowledge on the topic. This ambition has led to the development of this special issue. The issue includes results from original research on working life challenges encountered by small and new businesses, approached from a variety of disciplines. In this introduction, we begin by tracing an overarching framework, to which we add brief descriptions of the contributing papers. To conclude, we outline future research goals and discuss how issues around mental health, regulation and work environment inspections, race, disability and gender issues and the growing gig economy will affect the conditions for healthy entrepreneurial work.
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Successful management in the new millennium requires developing new methods and approaches to suit the challenges and opportunities of this new era of globalisation. An entrepreneurial approach is seen by many scholars and policy makers as a major option to enhance organisational performance in this era. The concept of entrepreneurship is multi-dimensional and often unclear. Various perspectives have different implications for how entrepreneurship is related to and can help promote sustainable development (SD). This introductory paper to WREMSD will attempt to explore viewpoints from around the world on entrepreneurship, management, and SD. The key objectives are to explain different perspectives on what is meant by the term entrepreneurship in a global context and to provide an overview of SD in relation to entrepreneurship. The paper argues that it is essential that research and policy development fully takes account of the differing perspectives of entrepreneurship and make explicit the particular perspective(s) that they are taking. No single definition necessarily fully captures the concept, but by being clear about our meaning of the concept and the underlying assumptions, we can progress our understanding of entrepreneurship and its relationships to SD.
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Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to present a tentative typology of social enterprises in South Africa. It also tries to establish a base line on the current state of social entrepreneurship in South Africa. While the term seems to have been appearing more and more frequently in both the public and political domain in the past decade or so, the current knowledge of social enterprise in South Africa (as in Africa more broadly) remains very limited.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper tries to address this dearth of academic literature on social entrepreneurship in South Africa by reviewing the extant academic and grey literature as well as various policy documents with the aim of discerning the various legal forms under which social enterprises can incorporate.
Findings
The paper distinguishes three avenues for incorporation: as a non-profit entity, a for-profit entity or a hybrid structure.
Research limitations/implications
It calls for both rigorous and systematic empirical and theoretical work that is grounded in the realities of the country to strengthen sound policy decision-making as well as effective organisation and management of these organisations, which can play a crucial role in both economic and social development of South Africa.
Originality/value
As part of the International Comparative Social Enterprise Models (ICSEM) project, this paper contributes to the understanding of the geographically distinct manifestations of social enterprise in South Africa. At the same time, it aims to present a research agenda to move social entrepreneurship in South Africa forward.
Social Entrepreneurship
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We are living in a time where innovation and technology are dominant economic and societal change agents that warrant special consideration and attention in entrepreneurship research. This article highlights one recent technologically driven phenomenon that is not only reshaping how people communicate and collaborate but significantly changing traditional organizational structures and improving business processes. The business community has coined this phenomenon as Social Business and predicts its impact to be similar to the Industrial Revolution. This article attempts to engage the research community by suggesting to add Social Business as an important and future area of our research agenda.
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Within the entrepreneurship and strategic management domains there has been a movement by scholars to combine certain aspects of both areas to create a new concept of strategic entrepreneurship. To date, however, there remains much to know about what constitutes this concept. This special issue is the result of a unique research conference in Germany where some of the world's most renowned scholars gathered to explore this concept in depth. The set of articles in this special issue examine different perspectives that relate to strategic entrepreneurship and we believe contribute to the growing body of knowledge on this concept by examining diverse scholarly topics. This introduction provides the overview of the perspectives contained in strategic entrepreneurship and argues for the importance of embracing diverse views at this stage rather than attempting to restrict the analysis of this emerging topic.
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Purpose – This Guest Editorial provides contextual insight to the contributions in this special issue that addresses entrepreneurship and economic growth challenge confronting Africa. Although the contributors come from various academic disciplines and adopt different perspectives, they are united in their singularity of focus on entrepreneurship as a pathway for African future. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – The papers in this special issue adopt different methodological approaches that help to provide a composite insight to the multidimensional entrepreneurial challenges facing Africa. They review published materials from the government sources and international agencies. They draw heavily on the literature in the field of entrepreneurship. Findings – African countries have made significant progress in stimulating economic growth in recent years. However, they still have a long way to go in terms of institutionalizing entrepreneurial paradigm to foster self-regenerating development. Africa needs to do more by leveraging public policy for entrepreneurial development as a pathway for expanding economic opportunities and alleviating poverty. A policy framework designed to anchor entrepreneurial culture in the economy is a key to African economic renaissance in the twenty-first century. Originality/value – The originality and value of the papers in this issue hinge critically on the all too often ignored proposition that African countries need to embrace a proven approach to development that is both broad based and citizen driven. Entrepreneurial paradigm will empower citizens to take not only full responsibility, but more importantly inalienable ownership, of the development process. This is the only way to ensure that the ongoing much celebrated growth in Africa is sustainable.
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Entrepreneurship ecosystems have become ubiquitous in the discussions around economic growth and new venture creation. Despite growing scholarly interest, however, the theoretical and conceptual foundations are still rudimentary, causing much debate among researchers and practitioners. At the center of these debates are questions like What are the boundaries of ecosystems? Are ecosystems build from the top-down or from the bottom-up? Or How can we measure the success of ecosystems? In this chapter, we summarize these discussions, present an overview of the existing research, and give an outlook on future directions.
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Examining 139 articles since 2000 published in leading management journals, we highlight that to date the field of entrepreneurship remains critically underrepresented among leading journals. The articles that have been published tend to take concepts from the West, replicate them in a single nation in Asia, and then discuss why the results were different from the West. There remains a rich range of topics that need to be examined in Asia. The development of this future research should focus not only on boundary conditions to the research from the West but scholars should also seek to begin to develop unique streams of insight that begin to utilize existing theory to develop unique Asian insights to entrepreneurship.
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Developing countries have, in the last few decades, pursued a number of strategies to promote indigenous entrepreneurship. According to the author, Africa has followed basically two models—parallelism and partnership—in this respect. Reviewing the progress of efforts so far, the paper argues that experience transfer and skill acquisition should be the essence of a meaningful programme of entrepreneurship development. The author's analysis and pre scriptions are based on his experience in South Africa and relate primarily to Africa, but they might provide useful clues to strategies relevant for other developing countries as well.
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