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Beyond the Moral Portrayal of Social Entrepreneurs: An Empirical Approach to Who They Are and What Drives Them

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Abstract

This paper questions the taken-for-granted moral portrayal depicted in the extant literature and popular media of the devoted social entrepreneurial hero with a priori good ethical and moral credentials. We confront this somewhat ‘idealistic’ and biased portrayal with insights from unique large-scale data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2009 survey on social entrepreneurship covering Belgium and The Netherlands. Binary and multinomial logistic regressions indicate that the intention and dominance of perceived social value creation over economic value creation is indeed what makes social entrepreneurs unique. In contrast to the extant literature, however, our empirical investigation points at a reluctant attitude of social entrepreneurs toward entrepreneurship in terms of confidence in their skills to start and manage a business, their perception of entrepreneurship as a desirable career choice and their involvement in their activities. While the extant literature points at a strong entrepreneurial orientation as a source of ethical issues (e.g., mission drift, profit orientation), the main contribution of this study lies in the reverse observation: ethical issues are also likely to emanate from a frail entrepreneurial profile. We formulate empirically grounded propositions that may serve as a basis for theory-building and testing purposes.

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Notes

  1. The noun ‘portrait’ originates from the past participle of portraire in Middle French (Webster’s Dictionary). ‘Moral portrait,’ or ‘moral portrayal,’ is a phrase frequently used in the literature or theatre to refer to the description of the ‘moral’ qualities of a real or fictional character, along with the ‘physical’ characteristics of the latter. For instance, Palmer (1973) uses it in his essay “The Moral Portrait of the Hero: A Study of Three Ethical Questions in Beowulf.” Similarly, in this paper, we use this expression to refer to the psychological and perceptual dimensions of social entrepreneurs. See details further in text for the specific dimensions that we include when investigating social entrepreneurs’ moral portrait.

  2. In recent years, corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a dominant theme in the field of ethics in small businesses. While referring to ethics in small businesses we also mean to include CSR. In addition, whereas CSR and social entrepreneurship both relate to the social role of business in society, the main difference between both lies in the fact that the former does not give primacy to the social role; in social entrepreneurship, the business is seen as a means to a social end (Bacq and Janssen 2011).

  3. Fear of failure as a measure for risk aversion is debated. According to Parker (2009), it is unclear whether this variable measures risk aversion or something else, such as anticipated social stigma.

  4. In contrast to the aggregate level data that are available for all the 49 participating countries, the micro-level data are available only for the national team of the country concerned; data from the other participating countries are not freely available until three years following the survey. Since this study is the result of cooperation between the Belgian and the Dutch teams, we were able to use the data relating to these two countries.

  5. We chose to consider this category of respondents as social entrepreneurs. Hence, they are not counted as commercial entrepreneurs.

  6. The stage in the entrepreneurial life-cycle is omitted from these analyses because this variable is not known for the non-entrepreneurs by definition.

  7. A combination of the models is not provided because, for budgetary reasons, certain questions are only asked to a random selection of the respondents. As a result, the number of observations would drop considerably and would hinder interpretation of results.

  8. Regular two-sided t tests reveal that commercial and social entrepreneurs attach a significantly different number of points to economic and social goals (p value <0.01). The difference in terms of environmental goals is not statistically significant (p value >0.10).

  9. Since this was asked only to the social entrepreneurs and not to the commercial entrepreneurs, these statistics are not displayed here.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Entrepreneurship & Innovation Group, D’Amore-McKim School of Business, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

    Sophie Bacq

  2. Panteia/EIM Business and Policy Research, Zoetermeer, The Netherlands

    Chantal Hartog

  3. Department of Applied Economics, Erasmus School of Economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

    Brigitte Hoogendoorn

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Correspondence to Sophie Bacq.

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Bacq, S., Hartog, C. & Hoogendoorn, B. Beyond the Moral Portrayal of Social Entrepreneurs: An Empirical Approach to Who They Are and What Drives Them. J Bus Ethics 133, 703–718 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-014-2446-7

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