Content area
Full Text
Introduction
The growth of the social sector has been a key feature of economic activity in both the developing countries and the industrialized world (Moizer and Tracey, 2010). Members of society all over the continent call for considerate responses and creative endeavors addressing social and environmental concerns at an unparalleled scale. That said, social entrepreneurship has grown exponentially in recent years. At present, it is located at the center of attention for practitioners, policy makers and academics (Bosma et al., 2016). Practitioners seek for social-driven initiatives to multiply and diffuse impact. Policy makers design mechanisms to boost the social entrepreneurship ecosystem. Academics from different disciplines expand knowledge on social entrepreneurship through research activities and projects, mentoring and published evidence.
This pluralistic interest in the subject, allows social entrepreneurship to benefit from the injection of ideas derived from a wide array of theoretical traditions, paradigms and methodologies (Di Domenico et al., 2010). Yet, only a limited number of studies deal with social enterprises (SEs) per se, as a distinctive area of investigation. Furthermore, these studies are disproportionally oriented toward the similarities and differences between social and commercial enterprises (Moizer and Tracey, 2010). The strategic issues SEs are facing are rather underappreciated while strategic perspectives, such as how social entrepreneurs can improve competitive advantage, are still unexplored in the literature (Muñoz and Kimmitt, 2019). In this paper, we argue that finding ways to meet social needs and building commercial capacity (create and maintain competitive advantage) pose a unique strategic challenge for SEs which should be added with empirical content. SEs must grapple with the dual challenge of succeeding financially in competitive environments and simultaneously serving mission, a more demanding task given the likely tension between mission and financial margin (Frumkin and Andre-Clark, 2000; Spear, 2017). Hence, the understanding of what works strategically for SEs is essential (e.g. Cherrier et al., 2018; Muñoz and Kimmitt, 2019; Tian et al., 2018) to explain how they deal with competitors within and outside the social sector to achieve the intended purposes.
Reflecting the above considerations, our study relies on a paradigm from the for-profit world to identify what strategic options exist for SEs to secure an advantage against competitors and generate impact. More specifically, we apply...