Social Entrepreneurship Research: Intellectual Structures and Future Perspectives

Social entrepreneurship (SE) is an emerging research field that has received much scholarly attention in recent years. Given the global scope of this attention, this review explores the existing scientific literature on social entrepreneurship to contribute to a systematization of the research field...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Sustainability 2021, Vol.13 (14), p.7532
Main Authors: Cardella, Giuseppina Maria, Hernández-Sánchez, Brizeida Raquel, Monteiro, Alcides Almeida, Sánchez-García, José Carlos
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accelerators
Business models
Entrepreneurs
Entrepreneurship
Innovations
Nonprofit organizations
Profits
Psychological factors
Schools
Scientific papers
Social change
Social entrepreneurship
Social factors
Stockholders
Sustainability
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Summary:Social entrepreneurship (SE) is an emerging research field that has received much scholarly attention in recent years. Given the global scope of this attention, this review explores the existing scientific literature on social entrepreneurship to contribute to a systematization of the research field. Based on the publications in Web of Science and Scopus, a total of 1425 scientific articles were analyzed. We used the bibliometric method to describe the evolution of social entrepreneurship research (e.g., evaluation by years, authors, scientific journal articles, and countries in the SE literature that have had the greatest impact in terms of production). In addition, we used the mapping of knowledge networks through the citations and co-citations analysis to identify schools of thought. A keyword co-occurrence analysis was performed to detect key research topics over the years. The results show that, although the research is still in a nascent phase, it has a multidisciplinary character. Furthermore, social entrepreneurship appears to be a concept closely linked to three schools of thought: commercial entrepreneurship, sustainable entrepreneurship, and social innovation. The keywords analysis allowed us to isolate the constructs that the literature has considered antecedents (e.g., socio-psychological factors) and accelerators (e.g., education, network, culture, and gender) to the development of social entrepreneurial intention. We will further discuss the ways researchers can explore this research field and contribute to the global literature.
ISSN:2071-1050
2071-1050
DOI:10.3390/su13147532