The Dynamic Capabilities of Social Enterprise: Explicating the Role of Antecedents and Unobserved Linkage

Abstract

We tried to contextualizing the dynamic capabilities of social enterprise. Though the term is still under develop, social entrepreneurship has strong indication as counterweight of capitalism which at the last point trying to distribute welfare on a fairly basis. To preserve the movement, social enterprise needed firmly-framework concerning its process towards sustainable competitive advantage. Justified as the extension of resource-based view, dynamic capabilities signaled its strong contribution for social sector. Our study depicted on two folds question: what are the antecedents of the dynamic capabilities for social enterprise and what is the appropriate model that can clearly describe the true mechanism in developing dynamic capabilities. Using Schumpeterian and Penrosian theoretical thinking, the study found leadership style, productive knowledge management and effective network management as antecedents for dynamic capabilities. We also highlighted the possible linkage to address the three antecedents to sustainable competitive advantage if the company failed in achieving dynamic capabilities. By posing continuing social improvement, we believe that our study contributed a lot on how social enterprise should gain better competitive advantage in order to compete with pure-profit business organization.

Keywords: Dynamic capabilities; Social enterprise; Leadership; Knowledge management; Network; Sustainable competitive advantage