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Abstract:
Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify the leading organizational capabilities of social enterprises and their empirical verification in terms of their simultaneous impact on social entrepreneurship.
Design/Methodology/Approach: In this paper, a fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fs/QCA) was used to empirically analyze the complex relationships between a set of organizational capabilities and social entrepreneurship. These relationships were analyzed using data from selected social enterprises in Poland.
Findings: The results indicated that there was no single condition that necessarily and exclusively contributed to high or low social entrepreneurship. However, the sufficiency analysis performed revealed several configurations of conditions (organizational capabilities) that lead to high and low outcomes for social entrepreneurship.
Practical Implications: The main achievement of this research is the discovery of two configurations that lead to a high level of social entrepreneurship and one configuration of a low level of social entrepreneurship. This result is important for practice as it shows managers different combinations leading to social entrepreneurship. Importantly, by focusing on combining different organizational capabilities, it is possible to help formalization and encourage social entrepreneurship.
Originality/Value: This paper not only presents the different organizational capabilities that influence social entrepreneurship, but also tries to find out how the interplay of these different capabilities creates alternative configurations that contribute to social entrepreneurship.
Keywords: Social entrepreneurship, organizational capabilities, fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis.
JEL Classification: L26, L29.
Paper Type: Research article.
1. Introduction
Social entrepreneurship is a sub-discipline within entrepreneurship which remains a complex and still poorly developed and understood phenomenon (Rey-Martí et al., 2016). Social entrepreneurs undertake various activities aimed at introducing fundamental social changes that are transformative and innovative in nature (Zhang and Swanson, 2013). However, like other entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs need to source valuable resources and develop capabilities to create sustainable and profitable organizations (Renko, 2013). It is important to note that social enterprises face significant resource constraints due to the fact that they operate in an environment that makes it difficult to obtain resources and their core social mission in many cases causes them to resign from higher margins in order to reach more beneficiaries (Desa and Basu, 2013). As a result, many social enterprises are unable to solve large-scale problems and thus the scale of their social...