Social Strain and Social Entrepreneurs: Building a Sociological Perspective on Social Entrepreneurship

Abstract

Social entrepreneurship involves multiple disciplines and different perspectives or theories across disciplines have been used in this context. Though, several sociological perspectives have been used to explain behavior of social entrepreneurs, no empirical study has looked upon their emergence from the perspective of social strain. The present paper attempts to build a theoretical framework for social entrepreneurship from this sociological perspective. Building on Merton’s strain theory: “Social Structure and Anomie” (1968), it throws light on deviant behavior of social entrepreneurs in context of strain arising out of imbalance between cultural goals and socially prescribed means to achieve these goals. When existing social norms are not producing desired outcome, it creates a strain on the individual. Rather than contributing negatively to their environment/ society, they innovate new ways to achieve their desired social goals and exhibit deviant behavior by not behaving according with the socially prescribed norms. Sometimes, they even do not accept the goal and modify or change the whole existing social structure and replace it with new improved ones. Based on the discussion, several propositions have also been developed for further exploration.