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1. Introduction
Social entrepreneurship is an important ingredient in today’s business education environment and contributes significantly to the overall well-being of society. Solving business problems for underserved and resource-constrained communities depends on how well modern-day business leaders understand the impact of their products and services. In today’s global economy, there is a growing need for business leaders to adopt products, services and strategies that allow for increases in social value as well as economic value. Consequently, social entrepreneurship provides an important framework for focusing on human needs and understanding social equity. The main objective of this paper is to examine the ways in which social entrepreneurship connects ethics, institutional values and management education.
In our study, we examine the interplay between faith-based principles, such as dignity of the human person, and the processes of opportunity recognition and exploitation in social entrepreneurship through immersions with social enterprises offered through the Global Social Benefit Institute of Santa Clara University. In a search of young entrepreneurs’ reflection essays from Santa Clara University’s Global Social Benefit Institute between 2012 and 2013, we identify 19 accounts pertaining to 5 unique social enterprises. Using the Gioia methodology, we examine each account to understand how the young entrepreneurs give different sense to their immersion experiences, and attribute their reflections to underlying Catholic social teaching (CST) principles. When analyzing the data, we better understand how the young entrepreneurs “make sense” of a social change opportunity, thereby enriching the growing literature on sense-making, especially the emotional and spiritual angles.
Our results indicate that the social entrepreneurs make sense of the social change opportunities largely on the CST principles of solidarity, rights and responsibilities and dignity of the human person. In addition, we find differences in elaboration of the faith-based principles across the social enterprises when sampling on social needs. Thus, we argue that interpretations matter as students confront the realities in the social change opportunity context, and that the emotional and spiritual angles of sense-making should be considered in practical and scholarly work.
2. Literature review
Social entrepreneurship addresses social needs by catalyzing social change and creating social value. In a recent study, Choi and Majumdar (2014) propose that the concept of social entrepreneurship comprises five integral components, and envelope the social entrepreneur component,...