Social Entrepreneurship: A Societal Revolution

Abstract

In different areas of the world, the entrepreneurship concept has ceased to concern only the creation of capitalist firms and has expanded so as to encompass the competency of generating innovative organizational alternatives. And they are innovative not merely because their models differ from those adopted by firms and corporations throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, but also because they expand firms' strategic views beyond the market and its limited forms of transaction. In this expansion, social entrepreneurs' initiatives extend well beyond the mere commerce of products and services, in an attempt to (i) increase the socio environmental development of places left behind by capitalist economic growth; (ii) oblige society to include those who were deprived of the physical, social and economic means required to become social actors, whether as people, consumers or citizens; (iii) expand the opportunities for individuals to become emancipated through their own initiative, generating income and being able to freely choose the lifestyle they want to provide their children with; and (iv) ensure that future generations have the right to be born and live in freedom and with access to the natural resources that biodiversity offers man. Entrepreneurship has been the engine propelling much of the growth of the business sector as well as a driving force behind the rapid expansion of the social sector. The Grameen Bank is the world's largest micro-finance organization; it is a profitable business that has helped thousands of people, mostly women, out of poverty. Social entrepreneurship, the simultaneous pursuit of economic, social, and environmental goals by enterprising ventures, has gradually found a place on the world's stage as a human response to social and environmental problems (Haugh, 2007). This research proposal focuses on an emerging form of economic activity, social entrepreneurship. Alternative forms of organized economic activity are suggested as one solution to some of the problems in contemporary society. However, it remains unclear what these emerging forms are like and how they would operate. Social entrepreneurship combines uniquely social aim with entrepreneurial approach, although these elements individually are not new. While considerable research has been done on the concept and the business case of social entrepreneurship, there is less analysis on how social entrepreneurship affects and is affected by the societal context. The broad aim of this study is to analyze the role of an emerging form of organized economic activity and social entrepreneurship.