Despite the increasing interest on social entrepreneurship (SEs) research, little is known about the strategies that social entrepreneurs employ to improve society. Using Gioia methodology, this article examines 64 social entrepreneurs’ strategy profiles drawn from Ashoka, one of the world’s largest SE support organizations. This article identifies 10 unique SE strategies (e.g., peer-to-peer driven, certification + standardization, locals-as-experts+modern wisdom) –– that that can be categorized into four aggregate SE strategies: changing social relations, equalizing economic opportunities, enhancing resource use, and influencing public opinion. It also demonstrates that social entrepreneurs often use multiple and overlapping SE strategies to intervene wicked social problems, a concept labelled here as ‘intervention slack’, and the interplay between internal versus external and direct versus indirect forms of strategy needed to improve the society. Overall, this study deepens the SE strategy research and offers a typology of SE strategies that are useful for policy makers, practitioners and scholars.
References
Chandra, Y. (2017). Social Entrepreneurship as Institutional-Change Work: A Corpus Linguistics Analysis. Journal of Social Entrepreneurship (forthcoming)
Gioia, D. A., Corley, K. G., and Hamilton, A. L. 2013. “Seeking Qualitative Rigor in Inductive Research: Notes on The Gioia Methodology.” Organizational Research Methods 16(1): 15-31.
Hall, K., Miller, R., and Millar, R. 2016. “Public, private or neither? Analysing the publicness of health care social enterprises.” Public Management Review 18(4): 539-557.
Mook, L., Chan, A., and Kershaw, D. 2015. “Measuring Social Enterprise Value Creation.” Nonprofit Management and Leadership 26(2): 189-207
6. Institutionalization, scaling up and public policies
