Purpose This paper aims to explore how nascent social businesses move beyond the incubation phase and it develops understanding of how early-stage social businesses access finance to achieve growth. Design/methodology/approach This exploratory and inductive study is based on four focus group...

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to evaluate critically the extensively used social versus commercial entrepreneurship dualism that depicts these as entirely discrete realms possessing distinct and separate logics. Design/methodology/approach – To challenge this dichotomous representation...

Purpose – The emerging literature on social entrepreneurship and its role in economic development and social value creation is riddled with inconsistencies, overlapping definitions, and contradictions. However, the theoretical and practical importance of developing and applying social...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a detailed analysis of the social enterprises (SE) and social entrepreneurship (SEship) literature that has been published in international journals from 1991 to 2010, determining the intellectual structure of both fields and their maturity as...

Purpose – By proposing a comprehensive measurement framework, this paper attempts to move the nascent body of theoretical and empirical work on performance measurement in social entrepreneurship ventures (SEVs) into reach for practitioners. The purpose of this paper is to help social...

Purpose – The financial crisis of 2007/2008 has caused many to question the basic premises of the current business system. Porter and Kramer suggest that the purpose of the corporation needs to be redefined. They posit that the corporation, rather than merely pursuing financial value creation...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the motivations behind public sector spin outs, focusing on the Right to Request policy, which enabled NHS staff to set up their own social enterprises to deliver healthcare services. Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on empirical...

Purpose – This paper seeks to pinpoint the importance of critical research that gets to problematise social entrepreneurship's self‐evidences, myths, and political truth‐effects, thus creating space for novel and more radical enactments. Design/methodology/approach – A typology mapping...

Purpose – Current social entrepreneurship (SE) literature advocates a critical reexamination of the core construct. As such, and based on the seemingly endless definitional debate among academics, this paper seeks to empirically analyse social entrepreneurship discourse in the United Kingdom....

Purpose – In recent discussions on social entrepreneurship, there have been calls for the discipline to make better use of general theories of entrepreneurship. This article seeks to argue that while the literature may not be explicitly theoretical, it often draws upon taken‐for‐granted...