Social Entrepreneurship as a Path for Corporate Social Responsibility: An Exploration

Abstract

Social entrepreneurship is increasingly viewed as a hybrid path that could enable the closing of the enlarging equity gap in society. Corporates seen to garner an inequitable share of societal resources, have now been nudged through both formal and informal mechanisms, to share a portion of their profits with society at large. One of the paths adopted by both corporates and individual entrepreneurs to alleviate issues arising from poverty and inequity is the path of social entrepreneurship through Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). The paper explores the ecosystem of social entrepreneurship by looking at the entrepreneurship process through the theoretical framework of entrepreneurship as embedded in the social and economic relationships of the larger community that the enterprise is constituted in (Fletcher 2006). In its sense making as a private act enacted by a single entity, entrepreneurship is not disconnected from its environment, but embodies the socio economic trough it belongs to (Johannisson et al. 2002). Social enterprises with their goals defined by double and triple bottom lines, have common ground with the imposed CSR mandates for corporates to align their profit interests with their stakeholders at large.