Content area
Full Text
ABSTRACT
Does higher education prepare students to be effective social entrepreneurs who can address the major societal needs of the contemporary landscape? Based on our analysis of 246 syllabi, we found that social entrepreneurship preparation is advancing not only in business schools but also in other academic divisions and departments. Despite this interdisciplinary diversity, and contrary to research that suggests a divergence in perspectives across disciplines, our data supports convergence in the key topics taught. Specific to this special issue, our findings indicate that, while social entrepreneurship sits at the intersection of ethics and entrepreneurship because of its social mission, ethical frameworks and tools are rarely addressed explicitly in a course's curriculum. We posit that cross-disciplinary collaboration in research and teaching aids with an additional emphasis on ethics education will propel the field forward.
Keywords: social entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship education, multi-disciplinary, longitudinal study
INTRODUCTION
Since its initial inception as a domain of study, social entrepreneurship has been in many ways an intentional orphan, with no single discipline claiming total ownership. In his seminal paper the "Meaning of Social Entrepreneurship," Dees (2001) defined social entrepreneurs as change agents in the social sector who actively adopt a mission to create and sustain social value, not merely private value. The early pioneers (e.g., Bill Drayton, and Mohammed Yunus) recognized that this new approach - one that straddled the world of entrepreneurship and social change - extended beyond the world of business and business education and needed be rooted in a variety of business and non-business disciplines (Light, 2006; Worsham, 2012). Today, social entrepreneurship education is offered in academic programs in marketing (Sullivan Mort, Weerawardena, and Carnegie, 2003), public affairs (Dees, 2007), sociology (Seelos, Mair, Battilana, and Dacin, 2011), economic development (Massetti, 2008), and engineering (Mehta, 2014), to name a few.
The field's emergence in the early 1980s parallels the birth and upbringing of Generation Y (aka The Millennials). For them, social entrepreneurship is not an area of interest to a select few, but rather a part of the fabric of their generation. Millennials are different from previous generations mostly due to growing up bombarded by the media and ever-evolving technology. They all know the stories of companies like Microsoft and Apple, value freedom and autonomy at work, and...