Social entrepreneurs: Transforming business practices

Abstract

Social Entrepreneurship (SE) as a field of Scholarly investigation provides a unique opportunity to rethink concepts and assumptions from different fields of business research. Instead of proposing another conceptual approach and yet contributing to the academic literature, the authors have enacted on a deductive journey by examining few relevant cases of successful social entrepreneurs and clustering their strategies, organizational characteristics and personal qualities as the emerging themes of the present study. The basic premise is that if the SE is to become a structured field of research, there must be an effort to clarify and define key concepts and constructs. For that purpose the author draws on practical examples of the social entrepreneurs to elaborate on the essential components of success. The in-depth evaluation of the case studies has helped in arriving at common characteristics to their success. Three major themes emerged out of this qualitative study. They are Strategies, Organizational Characteristics and the Personal characteristics of the social entrepreneurs. Present paper is an attempt to unveil the core of SE in order to guide future research.