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Abstract
Social entrepreneurship has emerged as an exciting topic for researchers and practitioners. The desire for a better understanding of how to leverage entrepreneurial activities to create solutions to social problems has led to an increased attention into this stream of research. In order to provide a solid foundation upon which to build future research in this burgeoning field, this paper proposes a systematized overview of the primary areas of social entrepreneurship research and scholarship that have emerged over the past 20 years. In this paper, relevant social entrepreneurship literature will be categorized into the themes of definitions, measures of effectiveness, impact investing, nonprofit focus, and for-profit focus. While these areas may have overlapping characteristics in the literature they are proposed as appropriate descriptions of the current foundational topics in social entrepreneurship research and study.
Introduction
Early writings on social entrepreneurship can be found in articles related to understanding the flow of capital. Lucas (1990) sought to understand economic development initiatives and why it seemed that capital did not flow as readily into poorer countries as the economic indicators showed it should. Later in the decade Offer (1997) discussed the idea of non-market exchanges, such as gifts or donations, as being a key component of a free-market economic system, which is supposed to be based on individuals seeking to maximize their own return on investment, regardless of the impact that it had on others in the economy. Offer looked at the dynamics of regard, and how it impacted the way in which individuals continued to engage in non-market exchanges (1997). This "economy of regard", as Offer (1997) describes it, provides the basis for some of the language that would move forward the idea of a model of business that was focused, at least partially, on the intentional positive impact of a market exchange on society. Mello (1997) looked at the social impact of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) on a developing country, and how the impact of FDI reaches out beyond the initial return on investment, to actually help to grow the domestic production of the underdeveloped nation, a dynamic also studied by Gregorio & Borensztein (1998). However, one of the key contributions to the study and understanding of social entrepreneurship is the article...