Social Entrepreneurship as a Family Resemblance Concept with Distinct Ethical Views

Abstract

AbstractAlmost 25 years after Dees’ article on the meaning of social entrepreneurship, conceptual controversy persists. Based on a qualitative analysis of 209 definitions of social entrepreneurship and respective academic articles, we argue that the concept follows a family resemblance structure and identify the 12 distinct attributes that comprehensively define it. Membership in social entrepreneurship is not defined by a case possessing a universally accepted set of criterial features but by carrying shared attributes with other cases. The family resemblance structure points to the persistent fallacy of using the same term to label different phenomena and cautions researchers against causal homogeneity assumptions among different conceptual subtypes. Assuming a descriptive stance, we shed light on how distinct ethical positions relate to different definitions of social entrepreneurship. Among the existing conceptual variety, we identify four prominent subtypes and find that ‘market-based’ conceptualizations relate toeconomism, the ‘social business’ subtype relates torule utilitarianpositions, ‘efficiency-driven’ definitions are associated withhedonistic act utilitarianviews, and the ‘transformational impact’ subtype is akin to aeudemonic act utilitarianstance.