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Characteristics of Social Entrepreneur: An Explorative Analysis



Author(s)

Beatrice Orlando
Maria Antonella Ferri

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DOI:10.17265/1537-1514/2018.03.001

Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy
Universitas Mercatorum, Rome, Italy

This study focuses on social ventures as for-profit organizations which base their survival on social legitimacy and generate a social value, by employing usually marginalized categories of individuals. Specifically, this paper studies main characteristics of starting a business in case entrepreneurs springs from a disadvantaged group of people. We use a an extremely large-scale sample, at worldwide level, including 1,563 observations. The time span covers the period 2004-2018. We investigate main characteristics of starting a business considering census (low and low-medium income) of the founder and gender. We perform one-way Anova and correlation statistics. Our results confirm that, despite policy makers’ efforts, underdog individuals still have poor possibilities of starting a business because of capital required. Difficulties are greater for women than for men. The main limits of the analysis are the small number of variables used to investigate social ventures and the explorative method, which does not allow detecting causal relationships. At a macro-level, the paper shows that policies for incentivizing social entrepreneurship and social development are still scarcely effective. This contribution extends the knowledge in a field of research which is rather new. We originally contribute by digging to light that differences in gender are a poor explanation for social entrepreneurship. Findings are largely reliable because of the massive number and time-coverage of observations. Routinely collected observations are deemed to be less biased than cross-sectional analysis. Thus, the study detects a salient path in social entrepreneurship.

for-benefit companies, social entrepreneurship, disadvantaged groups, social legitimacy