The Social Entrepreneurship Zone

Social entrepreneurship is still in the developmental stage as a field of inquiry. In this article we introduce the concept of the social entrepreneurship zone. This new construct positions social entrepreneurship relative to the ways organizations plan to implement social change and the degrees to which they apply business practices to do so. Two new categories of organizations, social transformation entrepreneurial ventures and social improvement entrepreneurial ventures, reside in the social entrepreneurship zone. This categorization separates social entrepreneurial ventures into 2 distinct groups with their own unique set of characteristics. The social entrepreneurship zone construct should help researchers and other stakeholders better understand this emerging field so it can be further studied and developed.     

Social entrepreneurship: Creating new business models to serve the poor

The term “social entrepreneurship” (SE) is used to refer to the rapidly growing number of organizations that have created models for efficiently catering to basic human needs that existing markets and institutions have failed to satisfy. Social entrepreneurship combines the resourcefulness of traditional entrepreneurship with a mission to change society. One social entrepreneur, Ibrahim Abouleish, recently received the “Alternative Nobel Prize” for his Sekem initiative; in 2004, e-Bay founder Jeff Skoll donated 4.4 million pounds to set up a social entrepreneurship research center; and many social entrepreneurs have mingled with their business counterparts at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Social entrepreneurship offers insights that may stimulate ideas for more socially acceptable and sustainable business strategies and organizational forms. Because it contributes directly to internationally recognized sustainable development (SD) goals, social entrepreneurship may also encourage established corporations to take on greater social responsibility.     

The Social Network?: Nonprofit Constituent Engagement Through Social Media

Social media has become an important part of public relations for nonprofit organizations. Social media has the potential to engage stakeholders and constituents of nonprofit organizations. However, little scholarly attention has been focused on how users react to social media posts by nonprofit organizations. To enhance understanding of how organizational social media activity affects users’ engagement, this study examines Facebook and Twitter utilization and user response of nonprofit advocacy groups. The analysis reveals that users respond differently to stimuli across platforms.     

Theoretical Framework of Social Marketing Effectiveness: Drawing the Big Picture on its Functioning

Social marketing involves campaigns that aim to change individual behavior as well as prosocial behavior in diverse fields, such as health prevention and environment protection. Restricted public funds, debates about the social responsibilities of governments, nonprofit organizations and societies, as well as financial crises have increased interest in effective social marketing as a means of mitigating existing social problems. This article aims to draw the big picture on social marketing effectiveness by developing its theoretical framework. This framework brings together fragmented findings on social marketing effectiveness and incorporates a framework as a theoretically grounded process from relevant stimuli to intended responses. It provides a basis for further research. Recommendations for improved social marketing campaigns are derived. Managerial implications have great relevance for public and nonprofit management, as social marketing strongly influences the work and mission of public and nonprofit organizations.     

关于对大学生培养公益创业概念的研究

目前,大学生公益创业面临的问题是教育不足,需要社会的支持和信任,需要相关的政策支持及媒体正能量的宣传。高校应开展大学生公益创业概念的教育,使大学生对公益创业有一个比较清晰的认识,引导大学生选择公益创业的方向。同时,加大政府及社会组织给予大学生公益创业的支持,以增强大学生救死扶伤的信念,培养大学生良好阳光的心性,提高大学生公益创业的积极性。     

Female Social Networks: Identifying Better Communication Platforms to Advertise Nonprofit Services in Rural Pakistan

Women’s access to nonprofit organizations providing financial and community services is an issue in remote areas of Pakistan. Weak communication of nonprofit services to potential female clientele is a significant barrier to women’s access to nonprofit services. This article examines how personal networks among women in remote areas may improve the information delivery about the women-focused nonprofit projects in Pakistan. The women’s networks also play a critical role in members’ motivating each other to join the services offered by the nonprofit organizations. The study used concepts of network and social capital and current network analysis techniques. Data from three remote locations in Pakistan were analyzed using a 2-mode network analysis, content analysis of nonprofit websites, and face-to-face interviews. UCINET software program identified network routines (centrality measures).

The study found that friends, neighbors, and local schools are significant information sources for women. Most information about income-producing projects came from their spouses. Information about social services came from friends, neighbors, or social gatherings. Husbands have high betweenness centrality indicating high power over women’s access to services. Closeness centrality measures indicate that women are not well connected for exchanging information on nonprofit services.     

Ethics Programs, Perceived Corporate Social Responsibility and Job Satisfaction

Companies offer ethics codes and training to increase employees’ ethical conduct. These programs can also enhance individual work attitudes because ethical organizations are typically valued. Socially responsible companies are likely viewed as ethical organizations and should therefore prompt similar employee job responses. Using survey information collected from 313 business professionals, this exploratory study proposed that perceived corporate social responsibility would mediate the positive relationships between ethics codes/training and job satisfaction. Results indicated that corporate social responsibility fully or partially mediated the positive associations between four ethics program variables and individual job satisfaction, suggesting that companies might better manage employees’ ethical perceptions and work attitudes with multiple policies, an approach endorsed in the ethics literature. Sean Valentine (D.B.A., Louisiana Tech University) is an Associate Professor of Management in the college of Business at the University of Wyoming. His teaching and research interests include business ethics, organizational behavior, and human resource management. He has published in journals such as Behavioral Research in Accounting, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, and Journal of Business Ethics. Gary Fleischman (Ph.D., Texas Tech University) is an Associate Professor and is the McGee Hearne and Paiz Faculty Scholar in Accounting at the University of Wyoming. His teaching expertise is in accounting and entrepreneurship and his research interests are in business ethics and behavioral business research. He has published in journals such as Behavioral Research in Accounting, The International Journal of Accounting and Journal of Business Ethics.     

Responsible Marketing: Can Social Enterprises Show the Way?

In this article, the authors present a new perspective on responsible marketing. We discuss if and how social enterprises can present a new understanding of responsible marketing. Relevant publications (14 on social entrepreneurship, 40 on marketing in non-profit organizations and social enterprises and 41 papers on marketing) are selected and reviewed. The result of the literature analysis and synthesis show that social enterprises can gain from a more formal, systematic approach to marketing. Since social enterprises prioritize social goals over business results, successful adoption of marketing policies and practices can help then create a blueprint for responsible marketing. Marketing of socially relevant products and services by social enterprises thus create a new paradigm of responsible marketing. Such models can also be useful for larger corporations who look at social business and shared value creation as part of their business and marketing strategy.     

社会企业业绩计量文献评述

社会企业是是介于商业企业和非营利组织之间,具有创造经济价值和社会价值双重目标的混合组织。20世纪90年代以来,社会企业对解决国家政策尚未触及的社会问题发挥了重要作用,但社会企业理论研究远远落后于实践发展。本文介绍了中外社会企业业绩计量的研究现状,包括社会企业内涵、社会企业价值定量评价模型、社会影响计量方法、社会企业综合业绩计量方法,分析了现有文献的贡献和存在的不足,为后续研究奠定基础。     

The Ethical Frameworks of Social Media Policies Among U.S. Nonprofit Organizations: Legal Expectations,Dialogic Prescriptions,and a Dialectical Model

Nonprofit organizations are experiencing a new world of fundraising, marketing, and stakeholder engagement on a scale previously unseen and due largely to social media. This study investigated the extent to which nonprofits craft social media policies using ethical frameworks to guide online activity mindful of this new reality. Assessing the top 100 U.S. nonprofits and their social media policies, this study examined the 80,000 words of text extant within the available 55 nonprofit social media policies and found emergent themes that articulate the current ethical state of nonprofit social media policies. Hand-coding processes yielded themes of engagement, responsibility, privacy, protection, transparency, and respect. Computer-coding additionally aggregated these themes into larger themes of privacy, sharing, communication, accuracy, inaccuracy, engagement, and dialogue. Further analysis explored the ways in which nonprofit social media policies imply a dialectical model of ethical frameworks between legal and dialogic dimensions.     

浅议非营利组织在社会保障中的作用

受经济发展水平、经济结构、思想意识和价值观念等因素影响,目前在我国建立统一的社会保障体系面临许多现实问题。社会保障制度供给不能满足社会成员需求,有必要发挥制度外的力量来满足人民的需求。非营利组织以其非营利性和自愿性为核心特征,在发达国家提供社会福利方面扮演着重要角色。结合我国国情,借鉴国外经验,科学发展非营利组织对构建社会保障网具有重要意义。     

Consumer Trust,Social Marketing and Ethics of Welfare Exchange

The global corporate scandals such as Enron, Worldcom and Global Crossing have raised fundamental issues of business ethics as well as economic, social and anthropological questions concerning the nature of business competition and global capitalism. The purpose of this conceptual paper is to introduce the concept of “welfare exchange” to the existing notions of economic, social and anthropological notions of business and exchange in markets and society in the 21st century. Global competition and business success in the 21st century continue to raise the nature of economic value and the interaction among diverse actors in international markets, institutions and society. We believe that the nature of such exchange between consumers and organizations, which can also be termed social marketing, need to increasingly take into account a welfare and ethical component. In this paper, we introduce our concept of welfare exchange to emphasize the importance of such welfare and ethical issues in the global business environment of the 21st century.     

A Model of Social Entrepreneurial Discovery

Social entrepreneurship activity continues to surge tremendously in market and economic systems around the world. Yet, social entrepreneurship theory and understanding lag far behind its practice. For instance, the nature of the entrepreneurial discovery phenomenon, a critical area of inquiry in general entrepreneurship theory, receives no attention in the specific context of social entrepreneurship. To address the gap, we conceptualize social entrepreneurial discovery based on an extension of corporate social responsibility into social entrepreneurship contexts. We develop a model that emphasizes mobilization and timing as underpinnings of social entrepreneurial discovery and offer distinct conceptual aspects and theoretic propositions instrumental to future social entrepreneurship research.     

Blessing in Disguise? Social and Institutional Determinants of Entrepreneurial Intentions following Involuntary Job Loss

In this study, drawing from occupational identity theory, we argue that self‐employment decision is influenced by the extent to which one's perceived social status will be enhanced by pursuing such a career, as well as the presence of favorable institutional climate. Using nonprofit employment assistance agencies, we surveyed 266 individuals in the southern part of the United States who had faced involuntary job loss. The result of our hierarchical moderated regression data analysis indicates that perceived social status and business climate were significant predictors of self‐employment intentions. Overall, our findings highlight the role of social and institutional environment in facilitating self‐employment.     

Crime,community social capital and entrepreneurship: Evidence from Australian communities

Crime is an anti-social blight on communities that increases the cost of doing business, including for entrepreneurs. Drawing on Australian longitudinal data, this study examines the links between crime rates and the propensity for entrepreneurship within communities. We do so by matching propensity for entrepreneurship with types of crime found at the community level where crime occurs. We find that higher total crime rates, crimes against the person and property crime, significantly lower the propensity for entrepreneurship in communities. We also show that the core facets of community social capital – trust, membership in voluntary organizations and support and cooperation – mediate this relationship.Executive summaryWe comprehensively examine whether higher community crime rates – crime on people and crime on property – cause lower rates of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship research extensively examines how gaining social capital, defined as the social resources one gains within one's community, promotes entrepreneurship. This study considers whether a pervasive community dynamic in crime impedes entrepreneurship. Specifically, we show that the two main kinds of crime – people and property – inhibit entrepreneurship.We show the facets of community social capital that mediate the relationship between crime and entrepreneurship. We inform the role of community-based social capital in promoting entrepreneurship (Kwon et al., 2013) by considering how higher crime lowers social capital and in turn entrepreneurship. We show that core facets of relational social capital – trust, voluntary membership in community bodies, support, and cooperation – mediate the relationship between crime and entrepreneurship. Likewise, communities with more robust reserves of social capital are better able to withstand crime and promote entrepreneurship.Examining the link between crime and entrepreneurship allows us to contribute to the literature on entrepreneurship and social capital. We discuss the various ways in which crime diminishes social capital to shape entrepreneurship. In our framework that is predicated on theory on community social capital, crime creates distrust because it causes citizens to be wearier and more suspicious of each other, impeding sharing of ideas and knowledge for ventures. Crime impedes the efficacy and membership of community-based organizations that allow entrepreneurs to network. Crime reduces the support available for founders to start and sustain businesses in focal communities, as individuals seek opportunities and resources outside their communities. Crime diminishes the extent to which people take pride in and identify with their communities, as evidenced by voluntary membership in community organizations. Crime reduces collaboration because it leads to self-protective behaviors, including flight from high-crime communities, that hinder norms of reciprocity. Crime reduces cooperation as criminals are more likely to resort to coercion, as enforced by monitoring and violence, to solve business problems.Findings rely on a comprehensive database of crime rates across Australian postcodes. Crime is typically a localized phenomenon – it affects business outcomes in local communities. We obtain community-level crime rates from each Australian state and territory police force or relevant government agencies and match these data with entrepreneurship rates by postcode. Our primary identification strategy follows Dustmann and Fasani (2016), who estimate the effect of local area crime on mental health in the United Kingdom (UK). This identification strategy removes the effects of residential sorting and correlates crime with time-varying unobserved entrepreneurship determinants if there is no endogenous migration from local crime. The main findings are robust to instrumenting for local area crime to which movers are exposed and for historical abortion rates in the state or territory where the individual lives, as well as a number of other approaches to obtaining causal inference.The article holds considerable practical relevance for policymakers seeking to promote community entrepreneurship. Our study is highly relevant to community leaders and policymakers working to boost local entrepreneurship. Findings strongly suggest that efforts to reduce crime are a primary mechanism to protect social capital within communities and, therefore, entrepreneurship. Policy initiatives dedicated to creating and expanding social ventures would a) boost entrepreneurship and social capital and b) mitigate the detrimental effects of crime on entrepreneurship (Wry and York, 2017).     

Social Interaction: A Determinant of Entrepreneurial Team Venture Success

An important issue to explain the success of new ventures is mostly ignored by the research of entrepreneurship: the social interaction within entrepreneurial teams. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of social interaction, which was originally developed for innovation teams in the field of entrepreneurship research and theory.The theoretical discussion proves if an adoption of the social interaction to the field of entrepreneurship is theoretically possible. Using the data of 159 German entrepreneurial teams, the effects of social interaction on new business success are empirically proven. The introduced measurement model, which consists of six dimensions, shows a high quality in the empirical test. The quality of the social interaction within entrepreneurial teams is crucial for the new venture success. An empirical comparison with the frequently used team conflicts confirm that the measurement of conflicts is not a sufficient substitute measurement for social interaction. Overall, the social interaction in entrepreneurial teams could be seen as an important but not only factor of business success.     

Linking Social Entrepreneurship and Social Change: The Mediating Role of Empowerment

Entrepreneurship is increasingly considered to be integral to development; however, social and cultural norms impact on the extent to which women in developing countries engage with, and accrue the benefits of, entrepreneurial activity. Using data collected from 49 members of a rural social enterprise in North India, we examine the relationships between social entrepreneurship, empowerment and social change. Innovative business processes that facilitated women’s economic activity and at the same time complied with local social and cultural norms that constrain their agency contributed to changing the social order itself. We frame emancipatory social entrepreneurship as processes that (1) empower women and (2) contribute to changing the social order in which women are embedded.     

Organizing for Society: A Typology of Social Entrepreneuring Models

In this article, we use content and cluster analysis on a global sample of 200 social entrepreneurial organizations to develop a typology of social entrepreneuring models. This typology is based on four possible forms of capital that can be leveraged: social, economic, human, and political. Furthermore, our findings reveal that these four social entrepreneuring models are associated with distinct logics of justification that may explain different ways of organizing across organizations. This study contributes to understanding social entrepreneurship as a field of practice and it describes avenues for theorizing about the different organizational approaches adopted by social entrepreneurs.     

Using Video to Build an Organization's Identity and Brand: A Content Analysis of Nonprofit Organizations' YouTube Videos

Organizational scholarship has increasingly focused its attention to how nonprofit, for-profit, and government agencies develop their unique organizational identity through their strategic communication efforts. As social media continues to become more prominent in communication campaigns due to the high levels of public usage and public involvement with organizations on social media sites, it is important to examine these social media messages as they relate to organizational identity. YouTube videos increasingly are being used by organizations to educate and inform just as much as they are to entertain. Through a content analysis of the most viewed videos on the top 100 official nonprofit YouTube channels, this study found that nonprofit organizations primarily use their YouTube videos to inform and educate viewers about their missions, programs, and services. While the videos also occasionally discuss the organizations' advocacy, volunteering, and fundraising efforts, nonprofit organizations were not living up to their potential in terms of engagement through direct appeals for involvement. Additionally, the organizations were more likely to use outsiders' words and stories to build the videos' narratives rather than using internal stakeholders. The benchmark numbers provided by this study reiterate key rules that are stressed in practitioner-oriented work on video production for branding and identity-building efforts.     

Understanding Non-Profit and For-Profit Social Marketing on Social Media: The Case of Anti-Texting While Driving

Previous studies suggest that consumers tend to infer more negative motives of for-profit sponsorship on social cause than to non-profits. The current study is aimed at identifying potential effective strategies for for-profit organizations to engage in social marketing efforts. Results showed that participants expressed lower texting while driving intentions when the message was initiated by a non-profit than a for-profit organization. For-profit messages were more likely to elicit desirable persuasive effects if their business offering was congruent with the social cause. Participants' intentions to interact with promotion messages on social media predicted their offline behavioral intentions regarding the promoted behaviors.