Speaker
: Rocío Aliaga-Isla, HEC Liège
Title : From “Push Out” to “Pull In” Together: An Analysis of Social Entrepreneurship
Readers : Amélie Jacquemin and Ann Verbeke
Date : November 15, 2016 at 01:30 PM
Room : Doyens 22, Place des Doyens 1, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve
Abstract :
Definitions are important! They are composed of words that express what people think. Despite
numerous efforts to bring about a clear and unbiased definition of social entrepreneurship, there
is still confusion as how social entrepreneurship should be defined. The objective of this paper
is not to state a novel definition, this means not to "push out", but rather to "pull in" together
in order to better understand what the scholars are talking about through their own social
entrepreneurship (SE) definitions. In doing so, we contribute to the literature on social
entrepreneurship by synthesizing and analyzing the social entrepreneurship definitions to better
understand the field. To do so, a combination of methods was used: systematic review to reach
the articles proposing definitions and memetic analysis to understand the content of the
definitions by analyzing their memes. From the analysis, three main categories that cluster
memes by their similar semantic space were considered: entity types, entrepreneurial
opportunities and intentions/promises. Results confirm the lack of consistent meaning of the
categories under study as well as the fragmentation and the controversial character of the SE
field. From the analysis of memes, some stylized facts and propositions are made for
contributing to the advancement and understanding of the SE literature.
Keywords: social entrepreneurship, definitions, memes, systematic review
JEL: L26, L31
Registration: secretariat-ilsm@uclouvain.be