Social Entrepreneurship: Literature Review and Current Practice in Ethiopia

Abstract

The rapid increase of rivals and the resulted competition among non-profit organizations has necessitated the inclusion of innovative approaches in their activities. Social movements over the last twenty years have begun promoting social entrepreneurship. The social injustice in developing countries as a result of income gap, absence of unified definition for social entrepreneurship, and the legitimacy issue of social enterprises motivated the reviewer to conduct a literature review. The purpose of this review is to reveal the debatable issues with regard to definition, legitimation, and school of thoughts under the social entrepreneurship construct and to forward future direction in Ethiopia. The reviewer screened titles and abstracts of 61 journal articles and came up with 42 relevant articles having ISSN or DOI, articles published between 2001 and 2013, and articles published in indexed journals. With regard to the search engine, Google scholar search engine was used using search words “social entrepreneurship”, “legitimation of social enterprises”, “definition of social enterprises” and “social enterprises”. From the literatures reviewed it is well understood that providing a unified definition and framework for social entrepreneurship has been the challenge. Despite the ideological differences between the school of thoughts, cross-fertilization, rather than competition, between the schools of thoughts, will enrich the overall field of social entrepreneurship. Law makers in Ethiopia need to consider the special feature of social enterprises and it is better if they revise the existing legal forms of organizations as there is no legal form for social enterprises. Finally, both academicians and practitioners in Ethiopia need to work on developing the scarce research on social enterprises along with integrating the concept of social entrepreneurship in business education curriculums.

Keywords: Legitimation, Social Entrepreneurship, Social Enterprises, Social Innovation.