The study of how entrepreneurial opportunities are discovered or created is at the heart of entrepreneurship research (Shane, 2003), but has also expanded to the study of social entrepreneurship -- how do social entrepreneurs seek opportunities to generate social impact? Empirical researches in this field tend to focus on the enterprise founders and organisational leaders extensively. Yet, this is a one-way approach. Shepherd (2015) argued that opportunities emerge from the interaction of various enterprise stakeholders, founders being one of them but also other actors like investors, organisation partners, employees, consumers and beneficiaries. Thus, by conceptualising opportunity in this way, he takes away the monopoly from the entrepreneur or business leader; instead he expands the field of influence to other actors.
Following Shepherd, this paper takes the argument a step further. It conceptualises opportunity not as a singular overarching idea in an enterprise, but as a multiple reality where various organisational members pursue different opportunities within the organisation. In other words, there is not one opportunity to be exploited, there are multiple opportunities being exploited by different stakeholders groups within the same organisation.
With this proposed model, the paper shifts the empirical focus to employees as beneficiaries of work-integration social enterprises (Campi et al, 2006) in a post-disaster environment in southern Philippines as exploratory case study site. It asks the question: How do employees as beneficiaries of work-integration SEs exploit opportunities to economically recover in the post-disaster environment? Methodologically, an ethnographic approach and in-depth interviews were employed.
The key findings are three-fold. Firstly, beneficiaries collect a portfolio of economic opportunities to recover from the disaster and alleviate themselves out of poverty. Opportunities presented by social enterprises are only one of the many means. They combine it with informal work, livelihood programs provided by international organisations, dole-outs from charitable institutions, government welfare, and remittances from relatives living abroad or cities that are more progressive. Secondly, the economic opportunity portfolio that they pursue can confuse the beneficiaries on how social enterprises are supposed to function, sometimes confusing them as dole-out charitable organisations where work and financial benefits are not tied together. Thirdly, the confusion has significant human resource management implications in terms of the dissonance between the expectations of beneficiaries from those of the social enterprise leaders.
References:
Shane, S. A. (2003). A general theory of entrepreneurship: The individual-opportunity nexus. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Shepherd, D. A. (2015). Party On! A call for entrepreneurship research that is more interactive, activity based, cognitively hot, compassionate, and prosocial. Journal of Business Venturing, 30(4), 489-507.
Campi, S., Defourny, J., & Grégoire, O. (2006). Work integration social enterprises: are they multiplegoal and multi-stakeholder organizations?. Social enterprise: At the crossroads of market, public policies and civil society, 29-49.
3. Governance, employment and human resource management
