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Conceptualizing social entrepreneurship: perspectives from the literature

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Abstract

Social entrepreneurship is an emerging trend that has attracted the interest of the most diverse researchers whether due to the characteristics of the social entrepreneur or the type of surrounding environments that prove most propitious to the emergence of this particular type of entrepreneurship. This study attempts to identify the main theoretical characteristics of social entrepreneurship through recourse to bibliometric analysis based on co-citations. The results enable the aggregation of the state of the art in social entrepreneurship across four perspectives: social value, well-being embeddedness, internationalization and institutional.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Business and Management, University of Beira Interior & NECE – Research Unit of Business Sciences Covilhã, Covilhã, Portugal

    João J. Ferreira & Helena Alves

  2. Instituto Politecnico de Castelo Branco & NECE – Research Unit of Business Sciences Covilhã, Covilhã, Portugal

    Cristina I. Fernandes

  3. Universitat Politècnica de València, València, Spain

    Marta Peres-Ortiz

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  1. João J. Ferreira
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  2. Cristina I. Fernandes
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  3. Marta Peres-Ortiz
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  4. Helena Alves
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Correspondence to João J. Ferreira.

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Ferreira, J.J., Fernandes, C.I., Peres-Ortiz, M. et al. Conceptualizing social entrepreneurship: perspectives from the literature. Int Rev Public Nonprofit Mark 14, 73–93 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12208-016-0165-8

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