SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND SOCIAL BUSINESS: RETROSPECTIVE AND PROSPECTIVE RESEARCH

Résumé 0

"Social Entrepreneurship and Social Business (SE/SB), inclusive business, businesses with social impact and a higher purpose are becoming increasingly important both in academia and the business world (Sassmannshausen & Volkmann, 2013). Since the influential article by Dees (1998), many different perspectives about social entrepreneurship and social business have been discussed in academia. On the management side, these types of businesses have also proliferated in the last decades. Yunus with his work leading Grameen Bank has inspired many other entrepreneurs and organizations to create a new kind of business more embedded with a social purpose. The main purpose of the Social Entrepreneurship and Social Business (SE/SB) field is to diminish vulnerabilities and social inequalities in the world. Indeed, SE/SB are emerging as practitioners of market forces that play an integrative role in bridging sustainable business models with society needs, that still exist because of opportunities arising from government gaps. According to Yunus (2010), one of the goals of SE/SB is to reduce poverty. Therefore, another stream of thought that is aligned with SE/SB is the Base of the Pyramid (BoP). From the seminal article by Prahalad and Hart (2002) much has been debated about BoP and how businesses might have a social impact. From a first approach based on the idea of a market base, the BoP field has evolved to a more inclusive perspective that has some relations to the concepts of SE/ SB and currently has some of the same challenges of creating more inclusive approaches. The purposes of this article are twofold: firstly to examine some of the main themes discussed about SE/SB up to the moment and secondly to present some major themes that we believe will be the focus in the next years."