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Social entrepreneurship and well-being: The configurational impact of institutions and social capital

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Abstract

Social entrepreneurship (SE) is often viewed as an effective means to promote social well-being (SWB). However, how SE emerges from a country’s institutional and social context, and consequently, how the institutional and social embeddedness of SE influences the level of SWB in a particular country, remains unanswered. This study, utilizing fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), addresses these questions by exploring, (1) the configurations of institutional and social capital conditions that lead to high prevalence rates of different types of SE activities in a country, and (2) the configurations of such institutionally and socially embedded SE activities that deliver high level of SWB in a country. It advances the SE literature by revealing the embeddedness and configurational nature of SE. Specifically, multiple equifinal configurations of socio-political conditions can lead to high prevalence rates of not-for-profit SE and hybrid SE. Moreover, this study finds that while both not-for-profit SE and hybrid SE can facilitate SWB by interacting with socio-political conditions, they do so through different mechanisms.

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Notes

  1. The GEM created two subtypes of hybrid SE. If a hybrid SE’s economic mission is numerically more important than its social mission, it is called an “economically oriented hybrid SE”, otherwise it is defined as a “socially oriented hybrid SE”. Raw data on these two subtypes are not available from the GEM database, so we used data on hybrid SE.

  2. Although the GLOBE project only published cultural data in 2004, Jackman and Miller (1998) suggest that helpfulness culture can be stable over a 20-year period. Given the stability of culture, we chose socially supportive culture to measure informal institutions.

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Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this manuscript was presented at the Workshop for the Special Issue “Institutions and Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies” at Nankai University in 2018. We thank all participants for constructive comments, especially to Mike W. Peng, Sunny Li Sun, Weilei (Stone) Shi, and Yuli Zhang. We also thank the editors of this Special Issue, Sunny Li Sun and David Ahlstrom, and two anonymous reviewers for their excellent guidance. This paper was funded by the following funding sources: Major Projects of National Social Science Fund (15ZDA063); Fund of Humanities and Social Sciences, Ministry of Education (19YJC630032); and Shanghai Philosophy and Social Science Planning Project (2018EGL009).

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  1. School of Management, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, Shaanxi, 710049, People’s Republic of China

    Wei Deng & Qiaozhuan Liang

  2. School of Business and Management, Shanghai International Studies University, Shanghai, 200083, People’s Republic of China

    Peihua Fan

  3. Research School of Management, Australian National University, ACT, Canberra, 2601, Australia

    Lin Cui

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Deng, W., Liang, Q., Fan, P. et al. Social entrepreneurship and well-being: The configurational impact of institutions and social capital. Asia Pac J Manag 37, 1013–1037 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10490-019-09660-6

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