To date, much of social entrepreneurship scholarship has emerged from business schools and has - as a consequence - tended to focus on organisational, strategic, and financial issues. The perspective has largely been to use business models to explore social innovation, and particularly, social enterprise (social entrepreneurship that moves towards self-funding). The approach has largely been 'what can social entrepreneurship learn from business perspectives'. This is an important part of the scholarly picture, but the Journal of Social Entrepreneurship will have a far broader remit.

 

The vision for the Journal is as a high quality, multi-disciplinary publication that embraces and encourages work on social entrepreneurship from a range of scholarly perspectives beyond - but including - business and management and which accepts that social entrepreneurship has much to offer in its own right to business, and the third and public sectors. Primary amongst these disciplines will be: social policy and political science; anthropology; sociology; not-for-profit management; finance; organizational theory; strategy; social geography; (development) economics; ethics and moral philosophy; and social psychology. However, the Journal will be open to work in any scholarly tradition with the twin caveats that the work is squarely focused on social entrepreneurship, as defined above, and that it is high quality. 

 

Thirdly, market-orientation: by which is meant, not only conventional economic market strategies (as in the case of social enterprises), but a wider sense of placing social entrepreneurship in a broader competitive landscape of funding, outputs, accountability and legitimacy, all focused on a relentless effort to improve performance and increase social impact.

 

The Journal will be rigorously international in scope both in terms of its unit of analysis and its scholarly contributors. Social entrepreneurship is a truly global phenomenon and the Journal will recognise its culturally different manifestations across countries as well as explore key contrasts.

 

Finally, the Journal will be unprescriptive with respect to methodology, accepting qualitative and quantitative work equally on merit. However, in order to build the academic credibility of social entrepreneurship going forward, there is currently a need to move away from both descriptive case studies and individual 'hero' accounts of social entrepreneurs, so the Journal will actively look to support both more theory-inflected work and broader empirical studies.

 

This definition of social entrepreneurship includes both for and not-for-profit organisations, as well as public sector bodies, though it excludes all organisations whose primary purpose is profit-maximisation, irrespective of whether they also aim to do social good (this falls under quite the seperate heading of Corporate Social Responsibility which will not feature in the journal). Examples of Bottom of the Pyramid innovation will be considered for publication where the focal organisation aims first at social or environmental value creation by using a for-profit model.

 

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