TITLE PAGE

FOR THE PH.D. DEGREE

SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND SOCIAL INNOVATION:

INSTITUTIONAL ENVIRONMENT, IDENTITY CONFIGURATION, AND

RESOURCEFULNESS

By

HUANGEN CHEN

A dissertation submitted to the

Graduate School Newark,

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

in partial fulfillment of requirements

for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Organizational Management

Written under the direction of

Professor Jeffrey Robinson

and approved by

Professor Jerome Williams

Professor Shalei Simms

Professor Jiafei Jin

Newark, New Jersey

May, 2018
 Copyright page:

©[2018]

Huangen Chen

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

Social Entrepreneurship and Social Innovation: Institutional Environment, Identity

Configuration and Resourcefulness

By Huangen Chen

Dissertation Chair: Professor Jeffrey Robinson

Unlike the commercial counterparts who hold a constant salient business identity

that is for profit and opportunity oriented, social entrepreneurs need to resourcefully

control the tension and reach the equilibrium between both salient social activist identity

and business identity. However, a very limited number of studies exist to explain and

uncover the process of social innovation through social entrepreneurship. In this

dissertation that consists of three essays, I strive to provide insights on the knowledge of

social entrepreneurship and social innovation.

Essay 1 of this thesis starts by reviewing current literature of social innovation and

entrepreneurship to depict a picture of domain knowledge and delineate future research

questions. First, the boundaries of social innovation processes have not yet been fully

defined, leaving considerable room to contribute to both theory and practice. Further,

social entrepreneurship opportunities are the constructed results of motivation and

entrepreneurial alertness, as well as institutional, societal, organizational, and market

contexts where they are embedded. Likewise, these contexts also bring the institutional

norms and routines that challenge and constrain innovation process. Finally, building on

current theories, I bring together the three approaches (i.e., individualistic, structural and

ii
contextual) together and present a new conceptual framework to investigate social

innovation.

Essay 2 focuses on the main gap of how do the social entrepreneur’s salient role and

personal identity, which concurrently straddle both business and social welfare logic,

affect their cognitive schema and behavior patterns regarding being resourceful. By doing

so, this study tests a model of social entrepreneurial identity configuration and

resourcefulness for Chinese social entrepreneurs. Results indicate social entrepreneur

identity is composed of both the pro-social and the business identities (both role and

personal identity), and that the salience and structuring of them lead to the variation of

their resourcefulness. Resourcefulness was highest when the social entrepreneur’ identity

configuration holds a salient role identity aligned with both social and business logics

(i.e., balanced social entrepreneur). However, the perception that the local institutional

environments valued social businesses weakens the between-group difference.

Implications for social innovation and future research are also discussed.

Essay 3 relies on institution-based view to examine the role of both subnational

institutional environment and resourcefulness of social enterprises in China on their

innovative endeavors. Using survey data on Chinese social ventures, our results show that

regional institutional development enhances social innovation, while the role of

institutional development can be altered by entrepreneur's engagement of resourceful

behavior. These findings contribute to research regarding determinants of social

innovation under emerging market and provide new lenses to see innovation from

institution-based view and entrepreneur's active resources building. Implications and

limitations of the research are discussed.

iii
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Completing this degree was a dream that I had never dreamed of, and without the

support, patience, and guidance of the following people, this dream would never have

come true. I owe my special gratitude to them. First and foremost, I would like to express

the deepest appreciation to Prof. Jeffrey Robison. You continually and convincingly

conveyed a spirit of adventure regarding research and scholarship, and provided me the

intellectual freedom to explore my own path, create my own voice, and enable me to be

open-minded about learning and organizing in a complex world. The scholarly

professionalism, as well as impressive kindness and patience that I learned from you will

profoundly change my professional pursuit in ways that are just now emerging.

I would like to think my committee member, Professor Shalei Simms, Professor

Jerome Williams and Professor Jiafei Jin. As respectable, responsible and resourceful

scholars, you have provided me with valuable guidance at every stage of the writing of

this thesis. Your high-standard and constructive comments have empowered me to

improve this dissertation to a better shape. I wish to express my sincere appreciation to

you for help me to develop the fundamental and essential academic competence. Without

your guidance and persistent help, this dissertation would not have been possible.

Former and current Ph.D. classmates also play important role during my Ph.D. I

wish to thank Xiangyi Kong, Kaida Peng, Jiangshui Ma, and Shui Yu for their friendship

and support. Many other professors and colleagues have also provided me insight and

emotional support. I could not name them all. However, I do like to offer my special

iv
thanks to Dr. Dan Yang and Dr. Jimmy Ye, who granted me opportunities and support.

Otherwise, such a journey would not be possible.

Finally and most importantly, I would like to thank my family members. The

unconditional love and support of my wife, Lu, have been the most powerful sources of

energy for me. Although there are ups and downs, and twists and turns, your unending

encouragement and optimism carried us through. As the journey ran longer than expected,

your resolution surpassed mine and that gave me the will to continue, and I shall spend

the rest of my days showing you my love in kind. To my parents, Chun and AnWan, even

we are a thousand miles apart, your boundless energy and caring along this journey, is

something that I will forever be grateful. To my younger sister, Ray, I’m grateful for your

sustaining support and love, and your persistence in pursuing your academic journey has

inspired me so much. Lastly, my daughter, Claire, who just turned three, every time as I

watched you explore your world with curiosity and with all the energy and passion of a

child, such unfailing childlike appetite for what’s next and the joy of the game of living

will forever be your dad’s inspirations and comforters. For as Samuel Ullman says, “so

long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from men and

from the infinite, so long are you young.”

v
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION ................................................................. II

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...................................................................................... IV

TABLE OF CONTENTS .......................................................................................... VI

LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................... VIIIX

LIST OF FIGURES ..................................................................................................... X

CHAPTER 1- SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP: A GENERAL REVIEW .........1

1.DEFINITIONAL CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP ...............3
2. DIMENSIONALITY OF SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP.................................9
3.THE DISTINCTIVENESS OF SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP.......................18
REFERENCES .........................................................................................................21

CHAPTER 2-STUDY ONE .......................................................................................26

TITLE: THE ENTREPRENEURSHIP PERSPECTIVE OF SOCIAL INNOVATION:
TOWARDS A CONCEPTUAL MODEL .................................................................26
ABSTRACT..............................................................................................................26
1. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................26
2. THE “SOCIAL” INTO INNOVATION ................................................................29
3. SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND SOCIAL INNOVATION .....................48
4. PUTTING ARGUMENTS TOGETHER - A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK ..59
5. DISCUSSIONS AND CONCLUSION .................................................................61
REFERENCES .........................................................................................................64

CHAPTER 3-STUDY TWO ......................................................................................72

TITLE: MAKING SOCIAL CHANGE IN CHINA: HOW SOCIAL
ENTREPRENEUR’S IDENTITY CONFIGURATION AFFECTS
RESOURCEFULNESS ............................................................................................72
ABSTRACT..............................................................................................................72
1. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................72

vi
 2. THEORY AND HYPOTHESES ...........................................................................76
3. METHODOLOGY................................................................................................97
4. RESULTS ...........................................................................................................106
5. DISCUSSIONS AND CONCLUSION ...............................................................113
REFERENCES .......................................................................................................121

CHAPTER 4-STUDY THREE ................................................................................128

TITLE: LOCAL INSTITUTIONAL ARRANGEMENT AND SOCIAL
ENTREPRENEURIAL RESOURCEFULNESS: SOCIAL INNOVATION UNDER
EMERGING ECONOMIES ...................................................................................128
ABSTRACT............................................................................................................128
1. INTRODUCTION ..............................................................................................129
2. LITERATURE REVIEW AND HYPOTHESES ................................................136
3.METHODOLOGY ..............................................................................................145
4. RESULTS ...........................................................................................................153
5. DISCUSSIONS AND CONCLUSION ...............................................................156
REFERENCES .......................................................................................................162

CHAPTER 5- CONCLUSION ................................................................................167

REFERENCES .......................................................................................................169

APPENDICES ...........................................................................................................171

APPENDIX A: MEASUREMENT SCALES OVERVIEW .................................172

APPENDIX B: QUALITATIVE PHASE - MEASURES & INTERVIEW

PROTOCOL..............................................................................................................178

APPENDIX C: QUANTITATIVE PHASE – SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURS

SURVEY ....................................................................................................................190

APPENDIX D- CASES OF SOCIAL ENTREPRENEUR ....................................210

vii
 LIST OF TABLES

Table 1 Definition of Social Entrepreneurship/Entrepreneurs ................................4

Table 2 Definitions of Social Innovation ...................................................................30

Table 3 Identity Configurations ................................................................................84

Table 4 Descriptive Statistics – Study Two ............................................................103

Table 5 Correlations between major variables – Study Two................................108

Table 6 ANOVA analysis of the Identity Configuration and Resourcefulness ...108

Table 7 ANOVA analysis of the Identity Configuration and Resourcefulness - Mean

Compare ............................................................................................................109

Table 8 ANOVA analysis of the Identity Configuration and Resourcefulness -F-test

............................................................................................................................110

Table 9 ANOVA analysis of the Identity Configuration and Resourcefulness ...110

Table 10 Results of the Regression for Resourcefulness .......................................112

Table 11 Descriptive Statistics – Study Three ........................................................147

Table 12 Descriptive Statistics of Institutional Environment Index ....................150

Table 13 Correlations Between Major Variables - Study Three ..........................155

Table 14 Results of the Regression for Social innovation .....................................155

viii
 LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1 Three Dimensions of Social Entrepreneurship ........................................10

Figure 2 Theoretical Framework of Social Innovation ..........................................60

Figure 3 Hypothesized Model of Resourcefulness ..................................................76

Figure 4 Interaction of Identity Configuration and Perceived Stakeholder Support

for Resourcefulness ..........................................................................................113

Figure 5 Hypothesized Model of Social Innovation ..............................................136

ix
 -1-

Chapter 1- SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP: A GENERAL REVIEW

Garnering more and more visibility, social entrepreneurs make significant and

diverse contributions to their communities and societies, adopting business models and

eliciting entrepreneurial spirit to offer innovative solutions to complex and persistent

social problems (Zahra, Gedajlovic, Neubaum, & Shulman, 2009). Aligned to the

changing perception of market failure and government failure, the emergence of social

entrepreneurship has come to be interpreted as an essential mechanism for supporting

economic activity and transferring institutional arrangement in areas deemed unprofitable

by the private sectors and overlooked or insufficiently served by the governmental

planning (Dees, 1998; Mair & Marti, 2006). Meanwhile, the sophisticated network of

organizations exists to support and highlight the work and contribution of social

entrepreneurs further inform the general public as to how some of the most intractable

social issues, including poverty, inequality, environmental problems in both developed

and developing countries can be addressed efficiently (Dacin, Dacin, & Tracey, 2011).

On the one hand, we see the increasing awareness of the general public for a more

ethically and socially inclusive sourced and produced products (Nicholls & Opal, 2005),

adding pressures to both the market players such as companies and corporations to

reconsider their it business model regarding social responsibility. Moreover, market

policymakers such as government as well are under social pressure to develop and

implement policies to promote social inclusiveness and environmental sustainability

(Friedman & Miles, 2001). On the other hand, traditional NGOs or NPOs are under

reforming pressure too. Confronted with the shrink of funds provided by the original
 -2-

resources as well as rising intensity of competing for such valuable resources, the

requirements on more sustainable and effective solutions are urgent (Fowler, 2000). In

addition, the public grants have been cut back, which has aggravated the situation. As a

consequence, non-profit organizations have to cope with the competition with each other

and, in the meantime, provide better service for their clients (Nicholls, 2009). From this

perspective, social organizations are no longer purely responsible for charity activities

supported by donations, but are accountable for their own revenues, striving to expand

their financial sources with an all-out effort.

Social entrepreneurship (SE), as an essential subset of entrepreneurship theory, has

been steadily amassing the literature and becoming a significant domain of inquiry.

However, scholarly research faces several challenges. First and foremost, while some

scholars embrace broader definitions that relate social entrepreneurship to individuals or

organizations engaged in entrepreneurial activities with a social goal (Certo & Miller,

2008; Mair & Marti, 2006), still other scholars coming from different domains (e.g., not-

for-profits, for-profits, the public sector) are defining and examining the concept with

their respective perspectives, indicating that a unified theoretical definition of social

entrepreneurship has yet to emerge (Dacin, Dacin, & Matear, 2010; Short, Moss, &

Lumpkin, 2009). However, this continuing definitional debate did little to aid theory

development and sustained academic inquiry. Moreover, in spite of the differences

between these organizations and other enterprises regarding of their operation strategies,

creative ways to achieve their objectives in social aspects as well as training initiatives,

there is a point in emphasizing the estimated profits gained through constant attention to

the social entrepreneurship (Leadbeater, 1997). Finally, entrepreneurship is inherited in a

 -3-

certain social context, dependent on social relations and closely connected with nature,

which is especially applicable to the satisfaction of urgent social demands and the

generation of novel opportunities in the society which private enterprises and the massive

social members are unable to achieve. Thereby, social opportunities and institutional

factor are deeply related (Urbano & Ferri, 2011; Zahra, Rawhouser, Bhawe, Neubaum, &

Hayton, 2008). However, current researches of social entrepreneurship primarily center

on a handful of countries and their social context (e.g., U.S., Great Britain, India, South

Africa and the like), a condition we can improve and complement the picture by

employing more specific institutional settings in emerging economies such as China (Lan

& Galaskiewicz, 2012). Thus, an institutional approach can be useful to understand better

the complexity of this phenomenon (Mair & Marti, 2006). In the next sections, I further

elaborate on this phenomenon systematically in three sections to articulate how and

why social entrepreneurship provides us the unique opportunity to inform and extend

management and organizational sciences.

1.DEFINITIONAL CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Social enterprise has been identified as invaluable to the development and delivery

of innovative approaches to social problems/needs that persist, despite the efforts of

traditional public, voluntary or community mechanisms. Therefore the term "social

entrepreneurship" has been emerged as a new label for describing the work of the

community, voluntary and public organizations, as well as private firms working for

social rather than for-profit objectives (Shaw & Carter, 2007).

 -4-

However, the concept of social entrepreneurship means different things to different

people and researchers (Dees, 1998), and there have been several attempts to define SE in

the literature (e.g.,Mair & Marti, 2006; Mair & Marti, 2009; Robinson, 2006) , with most

of such attempts focusing heavily on conceptual over empirical research (Short et al.,

2009). For example, some scholars define social entrepreneurship as a process applied

when the government or nonprofit organizations function by using business

principles/schemes (Austin, Stevenson, & Wei-Skillern, 2006). There are other scholars

see it as the activities of entrepreneurs who practice corporate social responsibility (Baron,

2007) or as outcomes of organized philanthropy (Van Slyke & Newman, 2006) and social

innovation (Bornstein, 2007). More narrow and specific definitions also exist, for

example, Robinson (2006) define social enterprise as an economically sustainable

venture that generates social value through the completed entrepreneurial process of

identification, evaluation, and creation. Table 1 contains a representative selection of the

various definitions found in the social entrepreneurship literature.

Table 1 Definition of Social Entrepreneurship/Entrepreneurs

Source Definition

1 Thake and Social entrepreneurs are driven by a desire for social

Zadek (1997) justice. They seek a direct link between their actions and an

improvement in the quality of life for the people with

whom they work and those that they seek to serve. They

aim to produce solutions, which are sustainable financially,

organizationally, socially and environmentally.

2 Dees (1998) Play the role of change agents in the social sector, by: 1)
 -5-

Adopting a mission to create and sustain social value (not

just private value), 2) Recognizing and relentlessly

pursuing new opportunities to serve that mission, 3)

Engaging in a process of continuous innovation,

adaptation, and learning, 4) Acting boldly without being

limited by resources currently in hand, and 5) Exhibiting

heightened accountability to the constituencies served and

for the outcomes created.

3 Fowler (2000) Social Entrepreneurship is the creation of viable socio-

economic structures, relations, institutions, organizations

and practices that yield and sustain social benefits.

4 Mort, A multidimensional construct involving the expression of

Weerawardena, entrepreneurially virtuous behavior to achieve the social

& Carnegie mission, a coherent unity of purpose and action in the face

(2003) of moral complexity, the ability to recognize social value-

creating opportunities and key decision-making

characteristics of innovativeness, proactiveness and risk-

taking.

5 Bornstein Social entrepreneurs are people with new ideas to address

(2004) major problems who are relentless in the pursuit of their

visions . . . who will not give up until they have spread

their ideas as far as they possibly can.

6 Schwab Applying practical, innovative and sustainable approaches

 -6-

Foundation to benefit society in general, with an emphasis on those

(2005) who are marginalized and poor.

7 Austin et al. Social entrepreneurship as innovative, social value creating

(2006) activity that can occur within or across the nonprofit,

business, or government sectors.

8 Mair and Marti A process involving the innovative use and combination of

(2006) resources to pursue opportunities to catalyze social change

and/or address social needs.

9 Robinson I define social entrepreneurship as a process that includes:

(2006) the identification of a specific social problem and a specific

solution . . . to address it; the evaluation of the social

impact, the business model and the sustainability of the

venture; and the creation of a social mission-oriented for-

profit or a business-oriented nonprofit entity that pursues

the double (or triple) bottom line.

10 Martin & We define social entrepreneurship as having the following

Osberg (2007) three components: (1) identifying a stable but inherently

unjust equilibrium that causes the exclusion,

marginalization, or suffering of a segment of humanity that

lacks the financial means or political clout to achieve any

transformative benefit on its own; (2) identifying an

opportunity in this unjust equilibrium, developing a social

value proposition, and bringing to bear inspiration,

 -7-

creativity, direct action, courage, and fortitude, thereby

challenging the stable state’s hegemony; and (3) forging a

new, stable equilibrium that releases trapped potential or

alleviates the suffering of the targeted group, and through

imitation and the creation of a stable ecosystem around the

new equilibrium ensuring a better future for the targeted

group and even society at large.

11 Short et al. The distinctiveness of social entrepreneurship lies in using

(2009) practices and processes that are unique to entrepreneurship

to achieve aims that are distinctly social, regardless of the

presence or absence of a profit motive.

12 Zahra et al. Social entrepreneurship encompasses the activities and

(2009) processes undertaken to discover, define, and exploit

opportunities in order to enhance social wealth by creating

new ventures or managing existing organizations in an

innovative manner.

13 Tracey, The social entrepreneurs creatively combined elements of

Phillips, and two established logics—the logic of for-profit and the logic

Jarvis (2011) of nonprofit to develop a sustainable solution to societal

problems.

14 Dacin et al. Social entrepreneurs balance both sets of priorities. A social

(2011) value creation mission does not necessarily negate nor

diminish a focus on economic value. In fact, economic value

 -8-

is crucial for the sustainability of social entrepreneurial

ventures and the creation of social value.

The various and non-unified definitions of social entrepreneurship reflect that the

concept is very much multifaceted. From the civilian society perspective, social

entrepreneurship exemplifies a new force and format of cross-sector cooperation for

social and political transformation (Austin et al., 2006). From the governmental

perspective, social entrepreneurship keeps providing innovative solutions to social

problems, making up the deficiency of governmental function (Lemaitre, Laville,

Nyssens, & Nyssens, 2006). From the more traditional commercial and business

perspective, social entrepreneurship offers the market more opportunities just as their

commercial counterpart (Austin et al., 2006). The differences in definition between

entrepreneurs, enterprises and social entrepreneurship are illustrated in Table 1, where

they are referred to as, respectively, the venturing of a business endeavor, the physical

manifestation of their ventures and the specific process or actions.

In line with many other authors (Austin et al., 2006; Short et al., 2009), I contend

that definition on the basis of individual characteristics hold the least potential for social

entrepreneurship research, because summarizing a definitive set of attributes that apply to

all kinds of social entrepreneurial activity across all contexts is almost impossible and not

meaningful (Austin et al., 2006; Moss, Lumpkin, & Short, 2008; Short et al., 2009).

Among these definitions, the one that is the most likely to help with the distinctive

comprehension of social entrepreneurship and its application in practice should

emphasize the objectives and results of the process of generating social values, no matter
 -9-

if they are beneficial or detrimental. Centering on the mission that prioritizes social value

creation allows researchers to examine the activities through which individuals and

organizations achieve specific outcomes. Such focus will enable researchers to uncover

novel insights into social entrepreneurship as well as to recognize the extent to which

insights associated with different kinds of entrepreneurs and organizations apply to the

social entrepreneurship context (Dacin et al., 2010).

In this dissertation, specifically, I employ Mair and Marti's (2006: 37) definition of

social entrepreneurship as ‘a process involving the innovative use and combination of

resources to pursue opportunities to catalyze social change or address social needs.' In

line with Austin et al. (2006), It is believed that the social entrepreneurship is an integral

component of the general notion of entrepreneurship and that it can contribute to its

counterpart in the economic sector. In addition, it seems impossible to give a clear-cut

distinction between economic and social entrepreneurship. Instead, entrepreneurship can

be defined with a scope with sheer social and commercial purposes being the two

extremes (Billis, 2010; Mair & Marti, 2006; Meier & O'Toole, 2011).

2. DIMENSIONALITY OF SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Though there are some differences in how scholars define the term “social

entrepreneurship”, this domain of inquiry shares the striking commonality as socially

oriented and commercially instrumental supporting mechanism for under-served

segments and market dysfunctions by creative problem-solving (see Dacin et al., 2010;

Zahra, Gedajlovic, Neubaum, & Shulman, 2009 for a comprehensive review of SE

definitions). By summarizing key themes from the mainstream literature, three

 -10-

fundamental, yet not exhaustive, dimensions of SE emerge 1) social mission orientation;

2) entrepreneurialism; 3) innovation orientation. Figure 1 shows the three key dimensions

of social entrepreneurship.

Figure 1 Three Dimensions of Social Entrepreneurship

2.1 Social Mission Orientation

The creation of social value is the centerpiece and prerequisite for social

entrepreneurship, whereas traditional commercial entrepreneurship aims at exploiting

profitable opportunities resulting in private gain (Austin et al., 2006; Dees, 1998; Dees &

Anderson, 2003; Peredo & McLean, 2006). The ideological underpin for the concept of
 -11-

social value creation confer ideas of virtuous behaviors, altruistic orientation, and more

general social interests such as freedom, equality, and environmental sustainability. This

aspect is the fundamental component that epitomizes the "social" part, and has further

been embedded in the mission statement for social wellbeing, in the goal management for

creating social wealth and addressing social issues and problems, and in the regard for

social needs rather than profit maximization (Dees, 1998; Mair & Marti, 2006; Zahra et

al., 2009). However, using social value creation as a contrast to commercial

entrepreneurship should be treated with caution. Indeed, the mission to create social value

is what drives most social entrepreneurs to pursue social entrepreneurship at least in the

first place, we should note that commercial entrepreneurship also greatly benefit society

in terms of new inventions and products, services, and employment opportunities, which

all have potential to make ‘transformative social impact’ (Austin et al., 2006:3) and such

transformative opportunity can even become motivator for some commercial

entrepreneurs. Further, there is a danger that in the process of venture creation, the social

entrepreneur may become increasingly focused on mobilizing resources to further the

organization’s growth as a means to achieve social impact rather than on social value

creation or social impact itself. Resource procuring, if left unchecked, may develop and

become a primary focus of the social organization’s operations and many times incur the

cost of social value creation. Authors such as Zahra et al. (2009) address this relationship

in a more systematic way in their proposed equation of ‘total wealth’, which they argue

as the combination of both tangible (e.g., products, beneficiaries served, or funds

generated) and intangible (e.g., happiness, emotional strength, or general well-being)

outcomes. ‘Thus, Total Wealth (TW)=Economic Wealth (EW)+Social Wealth (SW).

 -12-

Further, TW=EW+SW, where EW=Economic Value (EV) −Economic Costs (EC)

−Opportunity Costs (OC); SW=Social Wealth=Social Value (SV) −Social Costs (SC). As

a result, TW=EV+SV− (EC+OC+SC).’(Zahra et al., 2009: 522). This model is applicable

not only to the social enterprise but also to general entrepreneurship and can be regarded

as a response to the calling of defining entrepreneurship as ranging from purely social to

purely economic (Billis, 2010; Dees, 1998; Meier & O'Toole, 2011). It illustrates very

well the scenario of how the social value created by entrepreneurs may be offset by

economic costs (i.e., the market value of goods and services spent to create social value)

and the social costs (e.g., social discord) incurred, giving a promising heuristic for

stakeholders as well as social entrepreneurs themselves the checklist to reflect and design

to what extent she might dedicate her resources to social value generation while

balancing the role of economic value creation (Zahra et al., 2009).

Although it is not so hard to identify the primary unmet social needs, such as food

shortage, medical support, training or education, rescue and reconstruction, poverty

alleviation, the concept of ‘social’ itself is a highly ambiguous, complex and contested

concept (Choi & Majumdar, 2014). Oftentimes, social objective is intrinsically complex

and contextual in its nature (Di Domenico, Haugh, & Tracey, 2010; Seelos, Mair,

Battilana, & Dacin, 2011; Zahra et al., 2009), many of the products and services that

social entrepreneurs offer are non-quantifiable (e.g., is providing clean water for remote

villages in Africa more social valuable than empowering poor women to engage in

entrepreneurial activities in India?). Hence, it is difficult and imprecise to assess what

social value entails and which activities and projects can be considered as creating social

value (Dees, 1998; Zahra et al., 2009). However, theoretical and methodological
 -13-

advancements continue to emerge as the field of social entrepreneurship keeps drawing

elite scholars’ interest. For example, in a recent AMR paper, Kroeger and Weber (2014),

drawing on subjective well-being literature and organizational effectiveness theory, came

up with a very innovative framework to show its potential to solve the age-old

measurement issue of comparing unrelated social interventions that aim at different needs

of different treatment groups in different institutional contexts. Therefore, both the

creation of social value and concept of social value itself are the integral aspects of social

entrepreneurship, they delineate the distinctiveness and unique contribution of social

entrepreneurship, and at the same time add up the internally complex characteristics of

social entrepreneurship (Choi & Majumdar, 2014).

2.2 Entrepreneurialism

The second integral aspect of social entrepreneurship is the aspect of

entrepreneurialism, which addresses the entrepreneurially resourceful

behavior/means/processes to achieve the social goal (Mair & Marti, 2006), and is also

related to ideas such as market orientation (Nicholls & Cho, 2006), business-like

discipline (Dees, 1998), commercial efficiency and effectiveness (Austin et al., 2006).

While most entrepreneurial ventures operate under considerable resource constraints,

resources mobilization and acquisition challenges for social enterprises are seemingly

more significant due to hybridization of both social and business operation as well as

general weak institutional support in the environment (Battilana & Dorado, 2010; Desa,

2012; Desa & Basu, 2013; Zahra et al., 2009). Thus, critical questions such as to what

extent and by engaging in what kind of processes the social entrepreneurs can do with
 -14-

less and creatively recombine what’s already in hand or the environment will eventually

determine its survival and sustainability.

Various forms of resourcefulness (e.g., bricolage, effectuation, bootstrap,

improvisation, creativity) have been discussed in entrepreneurship literature to describe

the logic underlying the entrepreneurial process (Alvarez & Barney, 2007; Baker, Miner,

& Eesley, 2003; Baker & Nelson, 2005; Bhide, 2000; Hmieleski, Corbett, & Baron, 2013;

Powell & Baker, 2014; Sarasvathy, 2004). Among them, the entrepreneurial effectuation

theory (Sarasvathy, 2001, 2009; Sarasvathy & Dew, 2005) and entrepreneurial bricolage

theory (Baker et al., 2003; Baker & Nelson, 2005; Garud & Karnøe, 2003) have been

extended to social entrepreneurship to unpick the black box of social entrepreneurial

venturing (Desa, 2012; Desa & Basu, 2013; Di Domenico et al., 2010; Teasdale, Sunley,

& Pinch, 2012; Zahra et al., 2009). While both approaches highlight that successful

entrepreneurs can outmaneuver competitors by make use of resources they have on hand

to uncover the opportunity, the two perspectives differ in that effectuation theory tend to

underscore the entrepreneurial strategy to avoid long-range goals and plans, and focus

more on what the entrepreneur is willing to lose in making decisions about whether to

pursue an opportunity (Sarasvathy, 2001, 2009), and entrepreneurial bricolage theory

maintains the salience of refusal to enact institutional limitation for the pursuit of new

opportunity (Baker & Nelson, 2005). Because social enterprise’s unique organizational

form has been designed to take care of both social and economic value under conditions

of resource constraint, authors suggest that the concept of bricolage might be most

appropriate to shed light on social entrepreneurship (Desa, 2012; Di Domenico et al.,

2010). For example, Di Domenico et al. (2010) enrich the original ‘bricolage’ dimensions
 -15-

by including the distinctive feature of SE (i.e., social value creation, stakeholder

participation, and persuasion). According to Di Domenico et al. (2010:699), ‘the lack of

resources pushes the SE to use all available means to acquire unused or underused

resources that are capable of being leveraged in a different way to create social value’,

and social entrepreneurs deploy social bricolage to tap into their stakeholder networks to

access and build resources, to utilize persuasive tactics to construct legitimacy and

financial sustainability. Theorization as such provides explanatory power to answer the

question like how SE adapt to weak and insufficient resource environment not by

applying the conventional business model, but rather by engaging in an entrepreneurial

manner to reuse the redundant resource and untapped social capital.

In sum, the entrepreneurialism aspect characterizes the use of entrepreneurial

mindset and skill set to deal with resource scarcity and newness (Stinchcombe, 1965),

and its importance for the social mission organization’s long-term sustainability. This can

also be interpreted as using entrepreneurial orientation (Lumpkin & Dess, 1996; Rauch,

Wiklund, Lumpkin, & Frese, 2009) to gain organizational efficiency and effectiveness

and pay more attention on the performance strategies for financial sustainability and self-

sufficiency but doing so without sacrificing the social value creation both in the means

and ends. However, notably, social entrepreneurial activity can manifest itself in different

ways where there exists an interactive dynamic between the specific social mission goal

and the deliberate entrepreneurial schema used. Specifically, commercial activities by

social enterprise generate financial base to ensure the sustainability of social

entrepreneurial activities and self-sufficiency of the organization (Nicholls & Cho, 2006),

on the other hand, entrepreneurial orientation in the form of commercial activities could,
 -16-

in its implication, serve as the direct resource mobilization and allocation mechanism to

ensure the most effective and efficient distribution of social services and products, and

the desirable social impact expected. Therefore, entrepreneurialism is an integral part of

social entrepreneurship, evoking the contextual nature of the process and contributing to

the internal complexity of social entrepreneurship.

2.3 Innovativeness

The third aspect of social entrepreneurship, which has been identified by many

authors, is the centrality of innovation. While it is possible to be a successful entrepreneur

without being innovative, social entrepreneurs almost always use innovative methods

(Leadbeater, 1997, 2007; Schmitz & Scheuerle, 2012; Westall, 2007). Following the

Schumpeterian school of thought (e.g., innovation as economic transformation or more

intensive form of creative destruction), traditional commercial entrepreneurship is

understood as the process of identification and exploitation of business opportunity.

However, social entrepreneurship differs from commercial entrepreneurship not so much

because of the general social outcomes (e.g., at least in the sense that both social and

economic enterprises create jobs, and benefit society financially and socially), but most

importantly because of the input, be it either the sources of opportunity or the founding

mission as starting point (Bacq & Janssen, 2011; Neck, Brush, & Allen, 2009). In other

words, social entrepreneurship is not only about innovation, but it is also about social

innovation, which denotes the core of social entrepreneurship (Zahra et al., 2009).

By engaging in ‘a process of continuous innovation’ (Dees, 1998: 4), social

entrepreneurs adopt the non-traditional, and sometimes a disruptive way of approaching

 -17-

the social issue (Nicholls & Cho, 2006). The active involvement of innovation regarding

products/service and process is a notable distinction between social entrepreneurship and

traditional social service provision (Choi & Majumdar, 2014). Other authors emphasize

that social entrepreneurship is an ‘innovative, social value creating activity’ (Austin et al.,

2006:1) to define and answer social challenges. Social entrepreneurship, therefore,

represents an ideal context to detect the link between the social-mission oriented

organization and social innovation process. What needs to be noted is that definitions of

social entrepreneurship are not restricted to the founding of start-ups but also related

innovation initiatives in established nonprofits or for-profits, a phenomenon referred to as

social intrapreneurship (Mair & Marti, 2006; Seelos & Mair, 2012). Current research in

this field, however, is lagging behind maybe because the perceptive bias that mature

nonprofits are low in their responsiveness and agility to adapt to the changing

environments and demands (Dees, 1998; Seelos & Mair, 2012).

Moreover, social enterprises are regarded as innovators in social activities also

because of the social changes they have purposely pushed forward (Mair & Marti, 2006).

What makes social entrepreneurship unique is the nuanced employment of

entrepreneurial innovativeness to the social tasks that are difficult to meet without such

pattern-breaking thinking and means (Alvord, Brown, & Letts, 2004). Along the process,

a new business model is created, the new tool is utilized, and resource is created and

recombined for the new purpose of specific social change. The role of social innovations

in inducing social change has thus been strongly emphasized in the literature. For the

sake of disrupting the status quo and sustaining social transformation for a better world,

social entrepreneurs are the real fighters and "change agents" of the society (Dees, 1998).
 -18-

In this regard, social innovation is the third inseparable part of social

entrepreneurship and a suitable parameter of basing the social enterprise’s performance.

The social innovation view sees social entrepreneurship as a change agent at the system

level where the system of public interest is sustainably evolved (Nicholls, 2010; Phills,

2008). A social innovation perspective of social entrepreneurship provides a unique

opportunity for the scholarship to integrate other perspectives and reconcile the

competing understandings of what social entrepreneurship is and what it should be

(Austin et al., 2006; Dacin et al., 2010).

To summarize the above, these three dimensions can be regarded as the fundamental

characteristics of social entrepreneurship (SE), and SE thus can be viewed as the

processes, structure, and behavior/practice set out by an entrepreneur to solve social

problems/needs and create social values by combining business skillset and

entrepreneurial innovativeness to sustain or scale the double-bottom line (or triple bottom

line) business model of social interaction and optimization.

3.THE DISTINCTIVENESS OF SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Another prominent argument, yet of great theoretical importance, is whether all

entrepreneurial forms can be defined as "social"? The rationale is straightforward that all

successful enterprises will inevitably generate some social value—either directly, by

solving a social problem, or indirectly, by making tax revenues and creating employment

(Mair & Marti, 2006). In contrast to those who question the distinctiveness of social

entrepreneurship, a number of authors have emphasized the not-for-profit nature of social

 -19-

entrepreneurial activities as a distinctive feature of social entrepreneurship, and others

suggest that “the mission, motives, and challenges of social entrepreneurship are different

enough to warrant its own body of theory “(see, e.g., Austin et al., 2006; Hockerts, 2006).

Thus, the goal of this part is to elucidate the distinctive feature of social entrepreneurship

to delineate the concept further.

Firstly, SE is not CSR. The public often got confused with these two concepts,

thinking that the SE can be regarded as activities of conventional entrepreneurs who

practice corporate social responsibility. Corporate social responsibility, often abbreviated

"CSR," is a corporation's initiatives to assess interests of various stakeholders, and take

responsibility and accountability for the company's effects on environmental and social

wellbeing. While both SE and CSR stress their priority to make social value and

accountability, there remain two fundamental differences: CSR does not necessarily

require entrepreneurial initiative, nor does it require innovations. In other words, CSR, to

a greater extent, is an expected normative behavior that spread among organizations.

Though such efforts commonly go beyond what may be required by regulators or

environmental protection groups, they do not have any innovative implication (Baron,

2007). While the CSR of the organization reflects its careful attention to social issues,

profit maximization is still its ultimate goal.

Secondly, social entrepreneurship doesn't equal to social innovation. SE represents

an excellent example of social innovation model but is not the only practical model.

People sometimes talked about social entrepreneurship and social innovation

interchangeably, but distinctive difference exists. Social innovation as a process and

outcome can occur in various social sectors (public sector, the non-profit sector, and of
 -20-

course the business sector). In other words, social innovation can be a market-driven

product and initiative, and also can be a non-market oriented process, which exerted by

mindful individuals and organizations. We will have a more sophisticated discussion on

this topic in the following part of this dissertation, as social innovation is our primary

outcome variable.

Thirdly, Previous studies have laid a solid foundation for current researchers of

social entrepreneurship to proceed with their quest in this field. Research methods and

frameworks created and adopted in the economic sector have played an important role in

the efforts of defining the social entrepreneurship (Mair & Marti, 2006). But there are

two major distinctions between commercial and social entrepreneurship. To begin with,

they focus on different markets. Social entrepreneurship is mainly responsible for the

interests of the public, especially in case of market failures, while the commercial

entrepreneurship focuses on the commercial market. Moreover, social entrepreneurship

aims to spread the influence throughout the society, while commercial entrepreneurship is

dedicated to generating profits (Austin et al., 2006). Nevertheless, what is worth noting is

that social enterprises are not necessarily exclusively not-for-profit, but can pursue

benefits during their operations decided by their nature characterized by the requirements

on resources, services, and products provided by the society, fund-raising channels and

value-generating capabilities (Mair & Marti, 2006).

The last distinctive feature of social entrepreneurship lies in the limited potential to

capture the value created. It is virtually impossible for those social entrepreneurs catering

to fundamental social demands in substances, housing, and education to generate

remarkable profits, due to the limited, or even lack of abilities of the population in urgent
 -21-

need of these products to afford them (Kroeger & Weber, 2014; Mair & Marti, 2006;

Seelos & Mair, 2005).

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 -26-

Chapter 2-STUDY ONE

TITLE: THE ENTREPRENEURSHIP PERSPECTIVE OF SOCIAL

INNOVATION: TOWARDS A CONCEPTUAL MODEL

ABSTRACT

With the increasing interest in social problems in relation to entrepreneurship,

management, and public administration, the study on social innovation has achieved

considerable development over the last decade. However, the boundaries of social

innovation processes have not yet been fully defined, leaving considerable room to

contribute to both theory and practice. Finally, social entrepreneurship opportunities are

the constructed results of motivation and entrepreneurial alertness, as well as institutional,

societal, organizational, and market contexts where they are embedded. Likewise, these

contexts also bring the institutional norms and routines that challenge and constrain

innovation process. Building on current theories, this article aims to contribute to the

emerging theoretical discourse of social entrepreneurship by bringing together the three

approaches (i.e., individualistic, structural and contextual) together and introduces a new

conceptual framework to examine social innovation.

1. INTRODUCTION

Because of its perceived capacity to generate outstanding solutions to different

interrelated crisis confronted by lots of societies currently, social innovation has become

the main interest of study for scholars from varieties of disciplinary areas, as well as for

both policymakers and actors of the civil society (Cajaiba-Santana, 2014). The
 -27-

unparalleled problems at territorial, national and international levels require new tools

and strategies to solve the problems successfully. On their own, the market and the state

cannot manage and solve all problems. New methods are required to address the

significant social problems, “most especially in the presence of the systematic retreat of

the governments from the provision of public goods in the face of new political

ideologies that stress citizens’ self-sufficiency and give primacy to market-driven models

of welfare” (Nichols, 2006:1). The irreversible globalization offers the opportunity for

substantial and continuous restructuring and change. With the increase of competition,

territories need to more intensely engage in social and technological innovation.

Furthermore, regarding entrepreneurship, it should be “social” (intend to satisfy and solve

social needs that have not met, and thus generating social value) and “commercial” (to

pursue business as a primary objective economic value and appropriation).

A varieties form of social innovation, such as Grameen Bank, established in

Bangladesh by M. Yunus in 1976, and Ashoka, the global network of social

entrepreneurs generated by Bill Drayton in the 1960s, was like the glimpses of hope

when there are adversities and multiple challenges. However, there are thousands small

quiet, locally embedded, and “grassroots” social innovations emerge in every part of the

world on a daily basis, together contributing to the social betterment. Although both of

social innovation and social entrepreneurship are intended to offer creative solutions to

social issues that are unsolved, putting the creation of social value at the core of their goal

to improve the well-being and living condition of people and communities, they both are

recent fields of study and practice and related concepts are not well-defined. “Social

entrepreneurship” is a buzzy word, and is likely to overlap with the other terms, such as
 -28-

third sector, social entrepreneur, social economy, social enterprise and non-profit sector,

some of which are also ill-defined and overlapping (Austin et al., 2006; Moss, Short,

Payne, & Lumpkin, 2011).

Furthermore, the definition can be context-sensitive, in the sense that cultural and

geographical context should be taken into account. According to the explanation of some

authors (Defourny & Nyssens, 2008; Kerlin, 2006), social enterprise, social

entrepreneurship and social entrepreneur do not share the same meaning in America as in

European countries. The same confusion can be found in social innovations. Therefore,

there are varieties of context, scale and process of diffusion amongst what can be called

social innovations, which suggests different disciplinary fields, conceptualizations, and

definitions (Ruede & Lutz, 2012). Study on social innovations mainly relies on case

studies and anecdotal evidence without any unifying paradigm (Mulgan, 2006; Murray,

Caulier-Grice, & Mulgan, 2010). The literature remains scattered, disconnected and

fragmented amongst various fields, like regional and urban development (Moulaert,

Martinelli, Swyngedouw, & Gonzalez, 2005), administration (Klein, Tremblay, &

Bussières, 2010), public policy (Neumeier, 2012), social entrepreneurship (Lettice &

Parekh, 2010; Mulgan, Tucker, Ali, & Sanders, 2007; Short et al., 2009). Thus, it is

necessary to develop greater conceptual clarity around the fields.

A dialogue with the current theories is needed to have a full picture of the role

played by social innovations as an important source of social transformations via social

entrepreneurship. I follow the calling (Short et al., 2009) to combine the two theories

which guided the endeavors of incipient study on the subject: the ‘structuralist

perspective’ where social innovations are determined by the external context of structure,
 -29-

as well as the ‘agentic centered perspective’, a behaviorist and individualistic method

where social innovations can be created via the actions conducted by particular

individuals.

First of all, social network theory and institutional theory are used to show that

social innovations are the construed result of the collective social actions for social

transformation. This viewpoint considers social innovations as the outcomes of the

exchange and use of resource and knowledge by agents mobilized via legal activities

(Hollingsworth, 2000). Secondly, bricolage theory is drawn to show how social

innovations can be created as the transformation forces via the internal relationship

between social systems, institutional structures, and agents. This study is a response to

the call to action through a conceptual contribution to the conceptualization, discussion,

and social innovation research. Moreover, it is an answer to encourage new conceptual

and theoretical alternatives to comprehend the social innovation process (Mulgan, 2006;

Murray et al., 2010).

The paper is organized as follows: firstly, I present a review of the literature that

deals with systems of social innovation and social entrepreneurship and I highlight their

interplay. Secondly, I present the theoretical framework and then discuss its implications

and conclude.

2. THE “SOCIAL” INTO INNOVATION

In order to define social innovation as a distinct field of practice and research, the

addition of “social” needs to be justified and qualified (Choi & Majumdar, 2015).

Throughout the previous discussion, we have collected numerous insights from various
 -30-

literatures to theorize social innovation in the field of social entrepreneurship. We have

discussed that social entrepreneurship is not only about innovation, more importantly, it

is about social innovation, meaning that social institutional factors and their interplays

together constitute the organic whole. Notably, social innovation is not only conditioned

by institutional arrangement, but it also reacts and modifies it (Cajaiba-Santana, 2014;

Zahra, Ireland, & Hitt, 2000). In this section, I will discuss in detail in order to clarify the

concept of social innovation, which diversifies in terms of scale, contexts, and diffusion

processes.

Although extant research, especially in view of technology, has made the

considerable development of the concept of innovation, the idea of social innovation

remains to date underdeveloped (Cajaiba-Santana, 2014; Choi & Majumdar, 2015; Rüede

& Lurtz, 2012). Theoretically fragmented and disconnected, literature on social

innovation is scattered among different domains such as public policy (Guth, 2005; Heap,

Pot, & Vaas, 2008; Klein et al., 2010; Neumeier, 2012), sociology (Gillwald, 2000;

Howaldt & Schwarz, 2010; Zapf, 1991), urban and regional development (Bloch, 2011;

Gerometta, Haussermann, & Longo, 2005; Moulaert et al., 2005), management (Drucker,

1987), creativity (Mumford, 2002), social entrepreneurship (Dees & Anderson, 2006;

Lettice & Parekh, 2010; Mulgan et al., 2007; Short et al., 2009; Swedberg, 2009; Zahra et

al., 2009), and practice-oriented institutions (Mulgan et al., 2007; Murray et al., 2010;

NESTA, 2008; Phills, 2008; Phills, Deiglmeier, & Miller, 2008).

Table 2 summarizes a representative selection of the various definitions associated

with social innovation in the literature.

Table 2 Definitions of Social Innovation

 -31-

Source Definition

1. Mulgan et social innovation refers to new ideas that work in meeting

al. (2007) social goals...We have also suggested a somewhat

narrower definition:‘innovative activities and services that

are motivated by the goal of meeting a social need and

that are predominantly developed and diffused through

organizations whose primary purposes are social.’ (p.8)

2. Heap et al. It includes such things as dynamic management, flexible

(2008) organization, working smarter, development of skills and

competences, networking between organizations. It is seen as

complementary to technological innovation. Social

Innovation is part of process innovation as well as product

innovation and it includes also the modernization of industrial

relations and human resource management. (p.468)

3 Cajaiba- new social practices created from collective, intentional, and

Santana goal-oriented actions aimed at prompting social change

(2014) through the reconfiguration of how social goals are

accomplished.(p. 44)

4. Zahra et al. Creation of newer, more effective social systems designed to

(2009) replace existing ones when they are ill-suited to address

significant social needs. (p.523)

5. Moulaert Social innovation is path-dependent and contextual. It refers

et al. to those changes in agendas, agencies, and institutions that

 -32-

(2005) lead to a better inclusion of excluded groups and individuals

in various spheres of society at various spatial scales.

Social innovation is very strongly a matter of process

innovation – i.e. changes in the dynamics of social relations,

including power relations.

A social innovation is very much about social inclusion, it is

also about countering or overcoming conservative forces that

are eager to strengthen or preserve social exclusion situations.

Social innovation, therefore, explicitly refers to an ethical

position of social justice. The latter is of course subject to a

variety of interpretations and will in practice often be the

outcome of social construction (emphasis in the original).

(p.1978)

6. Caulier- …new solutions (products, services, models, markets,

Grice, processes, etc.) that simultaneously meet a social need (more

Davies, effectively than existing solutions) and lead to new or

Patrick, improved capabilities and relationships and better use of

and assets and resources. In other words, social innovations are

Norman both good for society and enhance society’s capacity to act (p.

(2012) 18)

7. Mumford the generation and implementation of new ideas about how

(2002) people should organize interpersonal activities, or social

interactions, to meet one or more common goals. As with

 -33-

other forms of innovation, the production resulting from

social innovation may vary with regard to their breadth and

impact (p. 253).

8. Klein et al. We see social innovation as an inextricable companion or

(2010) dimension of technological innovation as well as a

phenomenon that may arise independently from technological

innovation in the form of new social arrangements. In both

cases, social innovation allows to efficiently tackle social

problems unresolved by means currently available. (p. 126)

9. Cresson ...being a synonym for the successful production,

and assimilation, and exploitation of novelty in the economic and

Bangeman social spheres’ (p.1)… Innovation is not just an economic

n (1995) mechanism or a technical process. It is above all a social

phenomenon. (...) By its purpose, its effects, or its methods,

innovation is thus intimately involved in the social conditions

in which it is produced’ (p.11)

10. OECD The OECD working definition of social innovation implies

/LEED conceptual, process or product change, organizational change

Forum on and changes in financing, and can deal with new relationships

Social with stakeholders and territories. ‘Social innovation’ seeks

Innovation new answers to social problems by: identifying and delivering

s, 2000 new services that improve the quality of life of individuals

and communities; identifying and implementing new labor

 -34-

market integration processes, new competencies, new jobs,

and new forms of participation, as diverse elements that each

contribute to improving the position of individuals in the

workforce.

Social innovations can therefore be seen as dealing with the

welfare of individuals and communities, both as consumers

and producers. The elements of this welfare are linked with

their quality of life and activity. Wherever social innovations

appear, they always bring about new references or processes.

Social innovation is distinct from economic innovation

because it is not about introducing new types of production or

exploiting new markets in itself but is about satisfying new

needs not provided by the market (even if markets intervene

later) or creating new, more satisfactory ways of insertion in

terms of giving people a place and a role in production. The

key distinction is that social innovation deals with improving

the welfare of individuals and community through

employment, consumption or participation, its expressed

purpose being therefore to provide solutions for individual

and community problems. (www.oecd.org/cfe/

leed/forum/socialinnovations).

11. Cloutier A social innovation is an intervention initiated by social

and actors to respond to an inspiration, to provide for a need, to

 -35-

CRISES benefit from an opportunity to modify social relationships, to

(2003) transform established patterns of behavior, or to propose new

cultural orientations. (p.23)

12. Skoll Social innovation “can simply be understood as ‘new ideas

World that work which address social or environmental needs’. It

Forum on may occur as a result of addressing new needs, reframing

Social circumstances to make unmet social needs clear and urgent,

Entreprene or changing organizational structures to grasp new

urship and opportunities to add social value. New programmes, models,

Social or ways of thinking – sometimes a combination of all three –

Innovation, may be the result. Social innovation is more than just

2007 invention. Diffusion or the scale of ideas is an integral part of

making its impact effective, as is coordinated action by a wide

range of people and organizations spanning social,

government and business sectors.”

(https://skollworldforum.org)

13. EMES, According to the EMES, social innovation can be seen “As

2007 arising from a new kind of entrepreneurship focused on social

goals, new products or new qualities of products, new

methods of organization and/ or production (often involving

different partners and resources), new production factors such

as atypical employment and involvement in governance,

mixing voluntary and paid employment, as well as new

 -36-

market relations such as the changing welfare mix, or new

legal forms such as the social co-operative in Italy which

encourages entrepreneurial and commercial dynamics and

formalizing multi-stakeholding.”

14. NESTA, According to NESTA (2008) social innovation refers to “new

2008 ideas (products, services and models) developed to fulfill

unmet social needs; many of those supported by the public

sector, others by community groups and voluntary

organizations; social innovation is not restricted to any one

sector or field; it can take the form of a new service, initiative

or organization, or a new approach to the organization and

delivery of services; social innovation can either spread

throughout a profession or sector – like education or

healthcare – or geographically from one place to another.”

15. Phills et al. A novel solution to a social problem that is more effective,

(2008) efficient, sustainable, or just than existing solutions and for

which the value created accrues primarily to society as a

whole rather than private individuals. A social innovation can

be a product, production process, or technology (much like

innovation in general), but it can also be a principle, an idea, a

piece of legislation, a social movement, an intervention, or

some combination of them. (p.39)

16. Harris and Innovation that is explicitly for the social and public good;
 -37-

Albury innovation inspired by the desire to meet social needs which

(2009) can be neglected by traditional forms of private market

provision or be poorly served or unresolved by services

organized by the state. Social innovation can take place inside

or outside of public services and can be developed by the

public, private or third sector, users and communities;

however, some innovations developed by these sectors do not

qualify as social innovation because they do not directly

address major social challenges.(p.16)

17. Zapf Social innovations, then, are new ways of doing things,

(1991) especially new organizational devices, new regulations, new

living arrangements, that change the direction of social

change, attain goals better than older practices, become

institutionalized and prove to be worth imitating. (p. 89)

18. Gillwald Social innovations are, in a nutshell, arrangements of

(2000) activities and procedures that differ from previous

accustomed patterns and that have far-reaching social

consequences. (p. 1)

19. Heiskala Social innovations are changes in the cultural, normative or

(2007) regulative structures of the society which enhance its

collective power resources and improve its economic and

social performance. (p. 74)

20. Swedberg Social innovations are new combinations that produce social
 -38-

(2009) change. (p. 102)

21. Ziegler Social innovation is the carrying out of new combinations of

(2010) capabilities (p. 265)

22. Pol and An innovation is termed a social innovation if the implied

Ville new idea has the potential to improve either the quality or the

(2009) quantity of life. (p. 881)

23. Howaldt A social innovation is a new combination and/or new

and configuration of social practices in certain areas of action or

Schwarz social contexts prompted by certain actors or constellations of

(2010) actors in an intentional targeted manner with the goal of better

satisfying or answering needs and problems than is possible

on the basis of established practices. (p.16)

24. Dawson Social innovation can be broadly described as the

and Daniel development of new concepts, strategies and tools that

(2010) support groups in achieving the objective of improved well-

being. (p.10)

25. Simms Changes in [human] structure and organization are social

(2006) innovations. (p.388)

26. (Moulaert, Social innovation is about the satisfaction of basic needs and

2010) changes in social relations within empowering social

processes; it is about people and organizations who are

affected by deprivation or lack of quality in daily life and

services, who are disempowered by lack of rights or

 -39-

authorative decision-making, and who are involved in

agencies and movements favouring social innovation. (p.10)

As the above definitions show, different field of scholars often holds different

conceptions of the concept. Some researchers view social innovation as a very broad and

inclusive concept (e.g. Heiskala, 2007; Moulaert et al., 2005; Mulgan et al., 2007; Zapf,

1991), while others define it narrowly and consider specific phenomena as social

innovations (e.g.Heap et al., 2008; Klein et al., 2010; Mumford, 2002; Zahra et al., 2009).

This lack of consensus on the domain, boundaries, forms, and meanings of social

innovation results in a field of knowledge characterized by no unified definition and

largely idiosyncratic approaches (Cajaiba-Santana, 2014; Caulier-Grice, Davies, Patrick,

& Norman, 2012; Choi & Majumdar, 2015; Rüede & Lurtz, 2012). Due to this

conceptual confusion, theoretical advance is slow and cross-disciplinary dialogues are

hampered.

However, by scrutinizing their use of “social innovation” through various lenses,

discernable congruencies emerge and allow us to draw the common themes across the

literature. Table 2 suggests that definitions of social innovation focus on three core

features: social innovation as a response to the social challenge and unmet social needs,

social innovation as social change, social innovation as a core of social value creation.

Authors including Cajaiba-Santana (2014), Caulier-Grice et al. (2012), Choi and

Majumdar (2015), also discussed some of these factors in their observations on social

innovation. In the next, I briefly review these congruencies and provide synthesis with

special consideration for the field of social entrepreneurship.

 -40-

2.1 Social Innovation as Response to Social Challenge and Unmet Social Needs

Many definitions of social innovation share the assumption that those

practices/process/mind of change is set forth to address specific social challenges, to

benefit the disadvantaged group, and to enhance the general well being of people (e.g.,

Dawson & Daniel, 2010; Mulgan et al., 2007; NESTA, 2008; Phills et al., 2008).

Moreover, this theme resonates with social entrepreneurship’s definition, which put

social problem-solving and pro-social mission for the public good as the core element

(Dacin et al., 2010; Zahra et al., 2009). The emphasis of being “social” has been put on

both means and ends. In their discussion, for example, Phills et al. (2008) stressed that

not only the solutions (ends) but also the process (means) to arrive at these solutions is of

equally important. The process, as they argued, should be open, collaborative,

participative and experimental (Murray et al., 2010). Regarding the outcome dimension,

authors such as Pol and Ville (2009) distinguish the improvement of micro and macro

aspects of the quality of life. In their argument, micro aspect examples include personal

characteristics and set of valuable options a person has, and environmental issues and

political stability would be examples for macro-quality of life. Thus, the aggregating of

both micro and macro aspect gives rise to education opportunities, material well-being,

health domain, family life, job security, community life, political freedom and security,

and gender equality. Pol and Ville (2009) further state that a vast majority of social

innovations are at the same time business innovations since many business innovations

also help enlarge the option pool. The authors note that the desirableness of certain social

innovation is often a judgment call, and requires scrutiny. They use cigarettes as the
 -41-

example for successful business innovation, which can hardly be described as a

successful social innovation.

It has also been noted that social innovation as the solution to challenges can

originate in every sector of society from public sector to build new laws to strengthen

social cohesion, to economic sectors such as social entrepreneurship with a mission to

solve social problems, and to the third sector where innovative approach is adapted to

organize civil life. However, an emphasis has been put by some authors to build

exchange mechanism through collaborations between representatives of different sectors

(Goldsmith, 2010; Mueller et al., 2014; Nambisan, 2009). For example, Mueller et al.

(2014) suggest that by looking at knowledge transfer within the SBE (Social, Behavioral,

and Economic) sciences, and applying it to new policy development, might aid new

social venture formation and their innovation capability. Sanchez and Ricart (2010)

indicate that, for social ventures to create tangible value for the low-income market, the

interactive model is advocated to combine, integrate and leverage both internal resources

with ecosystem’s capabilities to create new opportunity. Another SE context

collaboration example is offered by Budinich, Manno Reott, and Schmidt (2006) in

which they describe a hybrid value chain model used by a leading water systems

company in Latin America and two social entrepreneurs in Mexico to work

synergistically and provide better deliver irrigation systems to small farmers in rural

Mexico. Phipps and Shapson (2009), using theories of knowledge transfer and exchange,

explicated the experience of York University (Toronto, Canada) and their partnership

with the local research users in strengthening the impact of non-commercial research

through knowledge mobilization as a social innovation. As this school of thoughts

 -42-

maintained, social innovations are explicitly designed to meet a recognized social need

and are concerned with the relationship of the individual and society, the balance between

private value creation and public value creation. While a social innovation can be both

commercial and non-commercial, the main goal is often seen in the pursuit of social well-

being, solidarity, or quality of life instead of in profit-seeking (Caulier-Grice et al., 2012;

Mulgan et al., 2007; Phills et al., 2008).

2.2 Social Innovation as Social Change

A discernible group of scholars, especially those from sociology related background,

anchor their definitions of social innovation on the changes of social practices and

structure (e.g., Drucker, 1987; Heiskala, 2007; Howaldt & Schwarz, 2010; Nicholls &

Murdock, 2012; Zapf, 1991). Some scholars even treat the terms “social change” and

“social innovation” interchangeably, and therefore the word of social innovation does not

necessarily indicate new products or services inducing the social change, rather the word

of social innovation, in this case, speaks more to the social change itself, which unfolds in

changing social structures. In this regard, the idea of “social” is rooted in the

understanding of how people interact with each other and organize their relationships,

and thus the social innovation signifies ‘the establishment of new social structures rather

than specific new models, products, or services that aim for social change’ (Choi &

Majumdar, 2015:26), and the term ‘innovation’ suggest not only something new and

novel but also a notion of renewal on the general take-for-grantedness (Nicholls &

Murdock, 2012). Based on institutional theory, Heiskala (2007: 74) specified social

innovation as ‘changes in the cultural, normative or regulative structures of the society

 -43-

which enhance its collective power resources and improve its economic and social

performance.' Hence, research in this stream sees the term ‘social' as a more neutral than

to imply any normative notion of ‘better' or ‘socially desirable.'

Studies in this stream also inform a long-debated topic of the relationship between

social and technological innovation. Dawson and Daniel (2010:11) point out ‘profitability

and commercial success as a key driver for innovation’, and it is aligned with current

mainstream management literature, which the definitional root of innovation is largely

focusing on the exploitation of a new idea (Schumpeter, 1934; Shane & Venkataraman,

2000). Therefore, some authors tried to rationalize that the relationship between social

and technological innovation is a bidirectional causal relationship in which a social

innovation can be both a condition for a technological innovation or a result of a

technological innovation and technological innovation may serve as the bases for some

innovative social solution to be practically possible. The vivid examples are explained

that ‘although Thomas Alva Edison is mostly credited for the technological invention of

the light bulb, his greatest invention might have been the modern research and

development laboratory, as for Henry Ford it was not Model T but the assembly line, or

for Walt Disney not Disneyland but the Disney creative department' (Rüede & Lurtz,

2012: 15). However, what needs to be noted is that social innovation brings up social

change that cannot be built up by established practices. In other words, there is mutual

interdependence between social and technological innovations, and the dialectical

relationship is that while their intended purpose is fundamentally different, the overall

innovation process often consists of both parts, and their outcomes might eventually
 -44-

merge (e.g., the increase of overall well-being of the society) (Drucker, 1987; Gardner,

Acharya, & Yach, 2007).

The perspective of social innovation as social change, which the ‘social' denotes that

the innovation manifested in the social interaction and social practice without requiring a

tangible object, indicates another important distinction between technological innovations.

Whereas technical innovations are directed at technological advancements to create new

products or artifacts, social innovations are characterized by the immaterial structure of

new social practices, which does not come to fore as a technical artifact (Cajaiba-Santana,

2014). Therefore, since social innovations are oriented toward social practices, the

immediate guiding question might be how the social structure (e.g., institutional

arrangements) enable and constrain actors while acting upon those practices. As Howaldt

and Schwarz (2010) noted, the term ‘social' does not limit to the behavioral practices or

the social relationships involved in the whole process of innovation; it has a much

broader meaning rested on the creation of a greater public good. Furthermore, this

understanding of social innovation as the social change does not deny that new services,

products, or technologies induce the change in the social structure, rather it views the

resulting changes as social innovations, not the change-inducing innovations (Choi &

Majumdar, 2015).

2.3 Social Innovation as the Core of Social Value Creation

The final approach to defining social innovation focuses on the forms, process, and

outcomes of the social innovation, which centers on creating social value and thus on

positive social change. This is congruent with a common theme across the majority of
 -45-

social entrepreneurship definitions where the authors argue that the creation of social

value is the centerpiece and prerequisite for social entrepreneurship (Choi & Majumdar,

2015; Di Domenico et al., 2010; Mair & Marti, 2006; Zahra et al., 2009). This aspect is

the fundamental component that epitomizes the "social" part, and has further been

embedded in the mission statement for social wellbeing, in the goal management for

creating social wealth and addressing social issues and problems, and in the regard for

social needs/purpose rather than profit maximization (Austin et al., 2006; Dees, 1998;

Peredo & McLean, 2006). A social innovation that aims to create social value, therefore,

must not necessarily manifest only on the level of social interaction and social practice,

but can be as tangible as a new product or a new technology (Choi & Majumdar, 2015).

The active involvement of innovation in terms of products/service and process is a

notable distinction between social entrepreneurship and traditional social service

provision (Dees, 1998; Mair & Marti, 2006; Zahra et al., 2009). The ideological underpin

for the concept of social value creation confer ideas of virtuous behaviors, altruistic

orientation, and more general social interests such as freedom, equality, and

environmental sustainability. And social entrepreneurs are regarded as innovators in

social activities also because of the social changes they have purposely pushed forward

(Choi & Majumdar, 2015).

Besides the field of social entrepreneurship, a field such as urban and community

development also provide great insight into processes and mechanisms, which are

designed to induce positive social change and to create social value (Bloch, 2011;

Gerometta et al., 2005; Healey, 2009; Moulaert et al., 2005). This stream of research

places the community development orientation as the alternative in contrast to the

 -46-

market-led regional development (Moulaert, Martinelli, González, & Swyngedouw, 2007;

Moulaert & Nussbaumer, 2005). Authors in this group place central importance on the

mobilization of citizens and the promotion of social cohesion at the community level. In

their seminal work, Moulaert and Nussbaumer (2005) describe the examples of various

European cities' local innovations thickly, these include Berlin, Germany (e.g. a local

mediating organization that has been ‘particularly successful in integrating groups of

German resettlers from the Soviet Union in the governance structures of neighborhood

management’), Sunderland, England (a united entity by a workers co-operative and a

housing association continue to play central part in local economic development by

sharing their skills and help new co-operatives start), Milan, Italy (‘a psychiatric hospital

has been (re)integrated in the public, social and economic space of the city and the

metropolitan area by opening its doors and setting up economic activities run and used by

patients and neighbors’), and Cardiff, Wales (a collaborative arts-based project to build

awareness of the heritage and social history of a deprived neighbourhood and to engage

citizen participation) (Moulaert & Nussbaumer, 2005:1970). And they further

conceptualize social innovation as consist of three dimensions and theorize their

relationships: content dimension as the first dimension aims to explicate the specific

human needs and social goals that the social innovation addresses, and this dimension of

social innovation capture and concretize the social value created through the changes in

social relations and governance, which exemplify the second dimension. Also, those

changes in the routines, practices, and structures are in turn increase the socio-political

capability and empower the local agency to bring the about different form of social

innovation, and this empowerment mechanism is the third dimension.

 -47-

The emergence of this approach, is based on values such as solidarity and

reciprocity, can be interpreted as the response to the negative effect of traditional regional

development paradigms such as deregulation, privatization, and neo-liberalism (Moulaert

& Nussbaumer, 2005). An approach that calls forth to strengthen social inclusion into and

participation in social life, and meanwhile to make their voice heard whose needs are

insufficiently served. However, authors also underlie that the creation of social value is

often closely linked to economic outcomes that, in turn, produce tangible resources the

social activists can use to proceed their undertaking of social change. Thus, there is no

gain to discuss solely on social value creation while ignoring other critical outcomes that

jointly play an essential role in successful social innovation. This is complementary to

discourse on community sustainability in which the triple-bottom-line advocacy has been

ringing for so long.

So far, I have presented different conceptions of social innovation and discussed

their commonalities as social innovation as the response to the social challenge and

unmet social needs, social innovation as social change, and social innovation as the core

of social value creation. However, we should note that discourses on social innovation

concept have roots in different disciplines, and such plurality, on the one hand, deepens

our knowledge, and should, on the other hand, serve as a reminder that cautions need to

be paid to the context and audience of the source when citing and referencing the

literature. Among the three approaches identified above, for example, the distinction of

social innovation should be made between a socially desirable and normative

understanding (as discussed in approaches 1 and 3) and a sociological understanding of

change (as discussed in approach 2). Thus, the concept of social innovation will have to
 -48-

struggle for its clear epistemology and paradigmatic consensus, and we can imagine,

scholars will continue to debate whether or not social innovation should be studied as a

discrete field or yet another buzz word (Pol & Ville, 2009).

3. SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND SOCIAL INNOVATION

Social enterprise has been identified as invaluable to the development and delivery

of innovative approaches to social problems/needs that persist, despite the efforts of

traditional public, voluntary or community mechanisms. And therefore the term "social

entrepreneurship" has been emerged as a new label for describing the work of the

community, voluntary and public organizations, as well as private firms working for

social rather than for-profit objectives (Shaw & Carter, 2007). Thus the social enterprise

organizations (SEOs) include nonprofits with some earned income (Haugh, 2007);

nonprofits or for-profits with equal concerns for social and economic ends (Battiliana,

Lee, Walker, & Dorsey, 2012; Peredo & Chrisman, 2006) and for-profits with some

emphasis on social responsibility (Baron, 2007; Van Slyke & Newman, 2006).

However, the concept of social entrepreneurship means different things to different

people and researchers (Dees, 1998). Therefore necessary discussion and delineation of

the definitions are required here. There have been several attempts to define SE in the

literature (e.g., Mair & Marti, 2006; Robinson, 2006; Zahra et al., 2009), with most of

such attempts focusing heavily on conceptual over empirical research (see Dacin et al.,

2011; Short et al., 2009 for reviews). Though there are some differences in how scholars

define the term “social entrepreneurship”, the shared commonality as well as the

distinction between commercial entrepreneurship is that social entrepreneurship is first

 -49-

driven by social value and social change rather than private value and personal gain

(Dees, 1998), and that such practice is facilitated by drawing on entrepreneurial process

(Austin et al., 2006). Thus, definitions that reflect the opportunity exploitation and

resource combination process, as well as the Schumpeterian understanding of

entrepreneurship should hold the most promise to understand and delineate the field. In

this regard, I extend on Mair and Marti’s (2006) definition to define social

entrepreneurship as a process involving the innovative use and combination of resources

to pursue opportunities for both social and economic value that exhibits in the new form

of organizing.

A tenuous balance is required for the social entrepreneur to concurrently promote

social process without sacrificing the economic sustainability; such dual nature of social

enterprising offers unique opportunity to examine how individuals and firms fulfill the

entrepreneurial process of venture creation. Social entrepreneurial activity can manifest

in differently concerning the specific social mission and the deliberate entrepreneurial

schema used. Specifically, commercial activities by social enterprise generate financial

base to ensure the sustainability of social entrepreneurial activities and self-sufficiency of

the organization (Nicholls & Cho, 2006), on the other hand, entrepreneurial orientation in

the form of commercial activities could, in turn, direct resource mobilization and

allocation mechanism to ensure the most effective and efficient distribution of social

services and products, and the desirable social impact expected. The integration of social

entrepreneurship with general theories of entrepreneurship not only gives insights from

established theories of traditional entrepreneurship but also has potential to add nuance or
 -50-

enrich discussion about social value creation in traditional business models (Newth &

Woods, 2014).

3.1 A Process-Oriented Perspective of Social Innovation

This paper emphasizes on the process of innovation of entrepreneurship and regards

social innovation as the new integration of resources to solve social problems, and

entrepreneurship in the society as pushing these novel combinations to the marketplace.

Schumpeter (1934) centers innovation as the core of entrepreneurship process whereby

the entrepreneur ‘pushes through’ the innovation to market. In reconstruction

Schumpeter’s innovation framework toward a social orientation, Swedberg (2009)

considers that social innovations as the involvement of the institutionalization of a

specific innovation that become the accepted way of doing things. Such perspective is

echoed by Zahra et al. (2009:52) when describing the Schumpeterian view of social

innovation, ‘Creation of newer, more effective social systems designed to replace existing

ones when they are ill-suited to address significant social needs’. This view of social

innovation also resonates with Nicholls (2010) where it is argued that the social

innovation view of social entrepreneurship hold great potential for reconciling the

competing understandings of what social entrepreneurship is and what it should be.

In the above process-oriented definition of social entrepreneurship, the identification

of a social need was the chief criteria applied to identify and recognize opportunities

(Tracey et al., 2011). For traditional for-profit ventures, identifying and exploiting an

unmet need is a key motivator, while the type of opportunity addressed by social

enterprise is a social, community or public need which remains unsolved by both the
 -51-

public sector and the established charity institutions (Austin et al., 2006; Dees, 1998;

Robinson, 2006). Driven by the desire to affect change and make a difference and to meet

local social, social enterprises need to tackle the particular social issue more critically and

innovatively to expound and define opportunity of both social and economic value that

would otherwise have not been fully explored. Although there is a dearth of research

about what arms the social entrepreneur to be more innovative in identifying and

exploring unique social-economic opportunity, a process model that takes into

consideration contextual factors and cognitive dynamics will add to our understanding of

how and why successful social innovation happens to some while not others (Corner &

Ho, 2010; Dacin et al., 2011; Dacin et al., 2010).

3.2 Motivational Identity of Social Entrepreneurship - Tension and Balance

Social entrepreneurial motivation is complex and centered around the mission to

create social change (Swedberg 2009). There are attempts to articulate motivational

constructs of social entrepreneurs and how do they compare with commercial

entrepreneurs (Germak & Robinson, 2014; Miller, Grimes, McMullen, & Vogus, 2012;

Tan, Williams, & Tan, 2005). Compare with its traditional commercial counterpart; social

enterprise has to deal with additional tension to manage expectations from various

stakeholders in order to fulfill its social mission. So what role do non-pecuniary

incentives play in the mobilization of people into social enterprises, if profit

maximization is secondary to the social ventures? Altruism is attributed to such

discourse (Tan et al., 2005), arguing that social entrepreneurs possess an inner

motivation to help others and advancing social process. Miller et al. (2012) suggest that
 -52-

the sense of compassion might be the distinctive motivator for the social entrepreneur,

and model that the underlying mechanism of integrative thinking, pro-social cost-benefit

analysis, and commitment to alleviating others' suffering together transform compassion

into social entrepreneurship. By analyzing a unique in-depth interview dataset of nascent

social entrepreneurs participating in a training program and mapping out pathways to

social entrepreneurship, Germak and Robinson (2014) were able to identify possible SE

motivations:1) personal fulfillment, 2) helping society, 3) nonmonetary focus, 4)

achievement orientation, and 5) closeness to social problem. Such findings would serve

as bases for future questions such as to what extent can pecuniary incentive systems of

businesses be effectively utilized in social enterprises and, vice versa, to what extent can

non-pecuniary incentive systems in social enterprises be deployed in businesses.

Moreover, managerial implication could also be facilitated concerning sorting out the

most effective ways for a social entrepreneur to mobilize and manage volunteers, and

investor, as well as supporting institutions, would adopt such findings to supplement their

selection criterion. Thus, by examining these motivations and actions, future researchers

can capture the variety of social ventures, and accumulate more refined understandings

(Zahra et al., 2009).

From the identity perspective (Dacin et al., 2011; Simms & Robinson, 2009; Smith

et al., 2013; Wry & York, 2015; Zahra et al., 2009), a social entrepreneur comes with

her/his identity, which guides and reconfirms the decision-making schema and behaviors.

However, the concept of social entrepreneurship itself has a contested connotation in

which “social” and “entrepreneurial” each asks for and embodies its values and essences.

For example, Simms and Robinson (2009) posit that social entrepreneur identity is
 -53-

composed of both the activist and the entrepreneur identities and that the salience of one

identity over the other affects the decision to be a for-profit or nonprofit organization.

This stream of research is important because the concept of identity, defined as how

people define themselves, speaks to the fundamental questions of “who am I” and is,

therefore, the crucial antecedent of social entrepreneurial behaviors and processes. Future

studies in social entrepreneurship could likewise examine what’s the impact of identity

(e.g., activist vs. entrepreneur) on their perception of potential opportunity (value based

vs. issue based)? How the conflict/tension of identity within social entrepreneur would

downplay/deactivate their mindset of resourcefulness? Would social entrepreneurs who

keep a tenuous balance between activist identity (social value/need driven) and

entrepreneur identity (opportunity and growth driven) are more likely to achieve venture

success in terms of effecting economic viability and long-term social impact? Would the

salience of identity affect cooperation and competition among social ventures? Would

social entrepreneurs who perceive the opportunity to be more value-based (vs. issue

based) are more likely to engage in entrepreneurial behavior (e.g., bricolage/effectuation)

to enact such opportunity for scale and impact.

Aggregated to a higher level, the organizational identity of social ventures represents

as another research opportunity to investigate the interaction of between social identity

and business identity within social ventures. Founder(s) cultivates and embodies the

venture’s identity through the interaction and involvement with the local community, and

their values are conveyed. Just as an individual social entrepreneur, a social enterprise

could also possess multiple organizational identities due to its dual focus on both social

and commercial requirement. Research showed that congruence between multiple

 -54-

organizational identities impacts perceptions of organizational legitimacy (Foreman &

Whetten, 2002), and more effort needs to be directed to examine, for instance, how

members of social enterprise identify with their organization, what are the factors

affecting this identification process (Hogg & Terry, 2000)? Also, would social enterprise

possessing multiple organizational identities more advantaged in resource mobilization

and conflict resolution, and how they manage to do that (Young, 2001)?

3.3 Creative Problem-Solving and Innovation through Social Bricolage

Resources constraints, though applicable to most entrepreneurial ventures, are

perhaps more significant in social ventures due to both their mission tension between

social nature and economic sustainability and a relatively challenging social task they

deal with and less institutional support they can access to (Desa & Basu, 2013; Di

Domenico et al., 2010; Gundry, Kickul, Griffiths, & Bacq, 2011). The theory of

entrepreneurial bricolage (Baker & Nelson, 2005), focusing on traditionally less

“rational” scripts and action, keeps providing interesting insights on how and why certain

social entities are able to overcome environmental limitations and effectively implement

their social innovations (Desa, 2012; Di Domenico et al., 2010; Ernst, Kahle, Dubiel,

Prabhu, & Subramaniam, 2015; Linna, 2013; Mair & Marti, 2009). Although social

entrepreneurs may engage in bricolage or “making do” out of necessity, such

involvement might be driven by a strategic cognition for a long-term capability

construction (Baker et al., 2003; Desa & Basu, 2013; Hmieleski et al., 2013). However,

very little is known about the initiatives on bricolage brought by the mindful and

resourceful social entrepreneurs. Nor do we fully understand what drives the variation in
 -55-

the use of bricolage for social ventures. We also do not have a clear map on how

bricolage processes or strategies would facilitate or constrain a social organization’s

innovativeness and effectiveness. Combining entrepreneurial bricolage with social

entrepreneurship creates a new ground of interesting and valuable discourse to advance

theory in both areas.

3.4 Social Embeddedness - the Contingent Nature of Networks

The social network, regarding the nature of content, governance mechanism, and

structure of the relations, has emerged as a key theme within the entrepreneurship

research literature (Aldrich & Zimmer, 1986; Birley, 1985; Granovetter, 1982; Hoang &

Antoncic, 2003; Uzzi, 1996). Social entrepreneurship research can benefit from this

perspective not only because SE’s born ‘social’ nature as non-pure economic entity

organically related with its local social environment, but also because the social mission

impact makes various groups its stakeholders. Yet, how this theoretical body could be

used to explain the creation process of social entrepreneurship is understudied and

remaining as an interesting domain of inquiry (Busch, 2014; Certo & Miller, 2008;

Gedajlovic, Honig, Moore, Payne, & Wright, 2013; Haugh, 2005; Mair & Marti, 2006).

The concept of embeddedness is closely related to the notion of social networks, which

structure the system of social interactions where economic activities occur (Granovetter,

1985; Uzzi, 1996). Thus some scholars state that social entrepreneurship has to be

conceived in the relationships it maintains with other groups, other sectors of activity

(Lemaitre et al., 2006). In their recent article, Seelos et al. (2011) combine the notion of

social embeddedness with institutional theory to address that social enterprises can be
 -56-

better understood by checking its relationships with its local community and that their

sustainability is related to their ability to hybridize their social goals with the goals of

various local stakeholders to institutionalize their presence. The networks in which social

entrepreneurs embedded provide with not only social and emotional support but also the

instrumentality in making them aware of local conditions and helping them identify local

social needs that were not being met. Therefore, considering the local nature of the

opportunities recognized by activists, it was not surprising that the networks of social

entrepreneurs and social enterprises emerged as a key research theme. The involvement

of the founders, key staff, and volunteers in local networks generated for social

enterprises is a credibility gaining mechanism that offers assurance for their survival and

growth (Shaw & Carter, 2007). For social entrepreneurs, networks and networking

strategies were important for many of the same reasons which have been substantiated in

the extant entrepreneurship literature: acquiring non-redundant information, knowledge

of market and referrals of customer; identifying unmet opportunities and providing access

to possible funding sources and generating local recognition and legitimacy for the

enterprise (Peredo & Chrisman, 2006; Seelos et al., 2011; Westlund & Bolton, 2003).

More strategically, the venture is the weft and weave in a network of ties is an important

source of variation in the acquisition of competitive capabilities, and resource matrix and

learning systems.

Given the difficult social needs and the complex social issues often addressed by

social enterprises, a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the nature and

effect of networking is needed. Though networks are important in general for acquiring

information and building up trust, the boundary condition is worth investigation (Mair &
 -57-

Marti, 2006). Embeddedness may have positive as well as negative effects on social

entrepreneurship. For example, overly intimate bond (over-embeddedness) might exert

too much expectation and obligation, constraining social venture's freedom to exploit the

new opportunity and its structural autonomies to remain independent (Gargiulo &

Benassi, 1999; Granovetter, 1982; Mair & Marti, 2006; Uzzi, 1996).

Summing up, as a key feature of social entrepreneurship, embeddedness needs to be

examined in the relationships with other social actors. The embeddedness of social

entrepreneurship with local players suggests the complex interaction with its social

context, which can be defined as macro as to take consideration all the relationships

around social entrepreneurship or as micro as to focus on strong ties of partners and

resource holders to jointly fulfill their social venturing. A future study might study how

the venture’s or the entrepreneur’s local embeddedness (the extent to which

firm/entrepreneur has relationships with local partners) would possibly facilitate or retard

the entrepreneurial process. In other words, the contingent nature of social networks

should be examined in the context of social entrepreneurship and thus to offer

implications.

3.5 The Role of Institutional Arrangement on Social Innovation

Social entrepreneurship emerges from social and historical contexts, which in turn

bring the institutional norms, routines, and conventions that challenge and constrain

venturing processes. Another emergent stream of research opens interesting opportunity

to examine social entrepreneurship is to draw on institutional perspective (Battilana &

Dorado, 2010; Mair & Marti, 2009; Robinson, 2006; Smith et al., 2013; Tracey et al.,
 -58-

2011). The institutional theory focuses on the relationship between the organizations and

the environmental settings, thereby offering insight into factors associated with the

emergence of institutions and the processes by which they gain their legitimacy (Meyer &

Rowan, 1977; Scott, 2008; Suchman, 1995; Tracey et al., 2011). However, because of the

engagement of dual institutional logics (social welfare and business logic), social

entrepreneurs may face more competing and conflicting institutional pressures from the

environment and management of those pressures appear particularly challenging for

social entrepreneurship (Dacin et al., 2011; Smith et al., 2013; Wry & York, 2015).

According to early institutional scholars (e.g., DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Meyer &

Rowan, 1977), ‘complete legitimacy’ and ‘institutional isomorphism’ would require

internal clarity to align with external stakeholders, and thus make the position threatening

to attend conflicting demands. Yet, as recent studies suggest, both formal and informal

institutions jointly condition the process of enterprise creation (North, 1990), and most

institutional environments are characterized by plural and complex arrangements

interacting with each other (Dunn & Jones, 2010; Greenwood, Raynard, Kodeih,

Micelotta, & Lounsbury, 2011; Holmes, Miller, Hitt, & Salmador, 2013; Pache & Santos,

2013; Thornton, 2002). Therefore, in order to build the legitimacy, social entrepreneurs

have to approach the issues that take into account the interests of stakeholders in both for-

profit and nonprofit institutions (Battilana & Lee, 2014). This leads to a unique tension

for social enterprise to simultaneously demonstrate their social and business viability to

manage institutional conflict (Dacin et al., 2011). Thus, the interesting line of inquiry

would consider what kind of mentality and skillsets are needed to help SE across diverse

institutional contexts to achieve the dual goals. Those successful social enterprises that
 -59-

can operate within and across institutional boundaries may have great insight on the

understanding of expectation and impression management of various and diverse

stakeholders.

Moreover, social innovations brought by the SE are likely to be challenged by the

liability of newness especially those innovations aim at introducing changes in social

practices (e.g., norm and value, routine). At the crossing of balancing both social logic

and business logic, the social entrepreneur will be asked to make trade-offs between

different forms of legitimacy, which is offered by various institutional logics. However,

such question is a judgment call for the social entrepreneurs, in terms of which form of

legitimacy they value most at what stage of the entrepreneurial process and what kind

resource mobilization strategies they would like to use. Those are very interesting

theoretical questions that need to be addressed in future research under the context of

social entrepreneurship, which struggle to demonstrate both financial and social

worthiness.

4. PUTTING ARGUMENTS TOGETHER - A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

Throughout the previous sections, we have collected numerous insights from various

literatures, on which we draw now to build our theoretical framework for future

researches. See figure 2.

 -60-

Figure 2 Theoretical Framework of Social Innovation

In this theoretical framework of social innovation, I take into consideration not only

the three basic elements of the social entrepreneurship opportunity, the individual

entrepreneur, and the venturing process, but also more importantly the contextual factors

(formal and informal institutional arrangement; spacial and regional specification,

industrial and market dynamism, and organizational culture and atmosphere) to more

precisely describe the innovation process. As discussed previously, the social

entrepreneurship opportunities are the constructed joint outcomes of entrepreneurial

motivation and alertness and the organizational, institutional, and market contexts in

which the SE is embedded. Further, contextual forces directly affect the entrepreneurial

process concerning how and through what kind of pattern behavior (e.g., resourcefulness,

effectuation) the entrepreneur will adapt to mobilize and allocate the resources, which in

turn affect their capability accumulation. Meanwhile, the description, interpretation, and

exploration of the micro foundation of entrepreneur will shed light on how, specifically,

each of the contextual factors plays the role. “The social innovation process can be seen
 -61-

as an organic process that unfolds from the dyadic relationship between actor and

structure.”(Cajaiba-Santana, 2014:49). Such path is complicated and idiosyncratic as we

are handling people’s real experience in the environment as well as the growth of social

institutions and systems that are the key factors of social innovations. Not only do we

need to know how people act but also how they validate and rationalize their behaviors.

In other words, social innovation process is barely a linear development; rather it is

sensitive to institutional situations where they take place and was constructed from social

interactions between individuals and context between society and institutions (Cajaiba-

Santana, 2011).

In the end, these contextual forces resist and refine social innovations such that they

become the products of the financial, social, cultural, and political expectations of

stakeholders of social entrepreneurship ventures. The social innovation process also

requires attention to the individual persons; more specifically, to what they think, to what

they value, to how they behave, and to how interrelations between actors and social

systems take place. In order to take into account the complexity and contextual

dimensions of social innovation, we need methodological frameworks able to encompass

the procession evolution of the different elements that iterate in the social construction of

social innovations.

5. DISCUSSIONS AND CONCLUSION

This study aims to take the first step toward a better conceptual and theoretical

comprehension of the phenomenon to conduct the study in the future by providing insight

on the research of social innovations. It makes contribution to the literature of social

 -62-

innovations by putting forward a theoretical framework through a review of trans-

disciplinary literature. Current knowledge of social entrepreneurship has been mostly

from organizational scholars who focus more on the uniqueness of the social ventures

and the traits of their founders (Dacin et al., 2011; Short et al., 2009). Following this

perspective, social enterprise emerges as unprecedented form of hybridity where

contesting institutional logics – shared values, norms and beliefs that shape cognition and

guide decision-making in a field (Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005; Thornton, Ocasio, &

Lounsbury, 2012) are organically combined into one entity (Battilana & Dorado, 2010;

Battilana & Lee, 2014). Thus, research from this strand posits that social ventures are

more subjected to conflict than other form of organizations due to their struggling of

integrating social and financial goals aligned with the correspondent logics (Besharov &

Smith, 2014; Smith, Gonin, & Besharov, 2013), and the major challenge for SE is to

manage these tensions and reach for a productive and dynamic balance between the dual

goal contention. It is my argument that such internal dynamics of managing conflict will

lead to actors’ entrepreneurial behaviors, which ultimately determine their innovativeness

of providing social values. While current works have endeavored to understand how SE

can resolve such tensions through transcending (Battilana & Dorado, 2010) negotiating

(Battilana et al., 2014; Jay, 2013; Shepherd & Haynie, 2009b) and selectively coupling

(Pache & Santos, 2010, 2013) aspects of the commercial and social welfare logics, this

domain has much less knowledge about the process of innovating (Mueller et al., 2014a).

Given the presumption that social entrepreneurs are carriers of multiple logics, it

intrigues me to ask how do multiple logics (i.e., commercial vs. social welfare) become

interrelated to the innovation process during tackling social issues? What accounts for the
 -63-

level of their resourcefulness and innovativeness considering different perceived

conflict/tension of logics? How does the perception of conflicting logics affect the

patterned behaviors of combining social and economic aims? And what role does the

local institutional environment play and become relevant in the venture creation process?

By positioning social innovations to the social entrepreneurship context, the

framework is intended to consider exclusion and conflict as internal aspects of the

society, which need to be addressed on a constant and dynamic basis. It is important to

understand how behavior can be influenced by social systems and how social systems can

be influenced by agency. As my model implies, the agents (social entrepreneurs) interact

with social context reflexively and actively, changing and being changed by it since they

encourage social transformations via social innovations. As for practical implication, an

emphasis on various means and skills of thinking, instead of common analytical skills,

social players should develop repertoires aiming at developing resourcefulness (e.g.,

creativity (Korsgaard, 2011), bricolage (Desa & Basu, 2013; Gundry et al., 2011)), and

collaboration as a result of mobilizing resources and other agents.

This paper makes contribution to the opening up of new paths to explore the concept

that is not yet deliberated in the literature of innovation. Using a processual perspective

on social innovation creation, it is my intention to take a step in this direction. It shows

promises that we can create a complicated description of the process of social innovation

with this method. Thus, we can further expand our mindset by learning from and utilizing

other approaches. To conclude, I hope to highlight the theoretical argumentation of

framework in this paper and the operational tools for social innovation that should be

further developed in the future study.

 -64-

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 -72-

Chapter 3-STUDY TWO

TITLE: MAKING SOCIAL CHANGE IN CHINA: HOW SOCIAL

ENTREPRENEUR’S IDENTITY CONFIGURATION AFFECTS
RESOURCEFULNESS

ABSTRACT

This study tests a model of social entrepreneurial identity configuration and

resourcefulness for Chinese social entrepreneurs. Results indicate social entrepreneur

identity is composed of both the pro-social and the business identities (both role and

personal identity), and that the salience and structuring of them lead to the variation of

their resourcefulness. Resourcefulness was highest when the social entrepreneur’ identity

configuration holds a salient role identity aligned with both social and business logics

(i.e., balanced social entrepreneur). However, the perception that the local institutional

environments valued social businesses weakens the between-group difference.

Implications for social entrepreneurs and future research are discussed.

1. INTRODUCTION

The joint pursuit of social and economic goals distinguishes social enterprises from

commercial entities where social responsibilities are ancillary to financial concerns, and

from non-profits that depend on third-party donations for the pursuit of social welfare and

philanthropy (Battilana & Lee, 2014; Dacin et al., 2011). In other words, social enterprise

balances both social mission (ends) and entrepreneurial process (means), exemplifying a
 -73-

form of hybrid organizing (Battilana & Lee, 2014; Besharov & Smith, 2012; Billis, 2010).

From the institutional logic perspective (Thornton, Ocasio, & Lounsbury, 2012; Tracey et

al., 2011), such hybridity means that social enterprise needs to gain legitimacy by

simultaneously aligning with rules, norms, and values of various institutions where they

are likely to impose competing and conflicting demands on the organization (Greenwood,

Díaz, Li, & Lorente, 2010; Pache & Santos, 2010). Compared with its commercial

counterpart, the challenges of resource constraint and resource mobilization are further

exacerbated even in developed economies (Austin et al., 2006).

Generally, social ventures that operate in developing economies, such as those in

China, face environments in which quality resources are extremely scarce (Seelos & Mair,

2005; Zahra et al., 2008) or where institutional financing mechanisms are absent or weak

(Mair & Marti, 2009). However, such environmental constraint does not necessarily

prevent social ventures from creating socially innovative products or services. Aside from

some in-depth case studies of such exemplars, there has been limited theory development

and empirical work on the different approaches that social entrepreneurs adopt to

mobilize critical resources and the constraints that influence their choices. Concurrently

attending to both social welfare and commercial logics makes social ventures more

disposed to tension and conflicting pressure than other organization (Besharov & Smith,

2014; Smith et al., 2013; Wry & York, 2015). What intrigues us is how this variation of

the level of resourcefulness was not easily explained by prior theories of strategic

management or social entrepreneurship. To this end, some scholars have suggested that

identity may play an important role (Cardon, Wincent, Singh, & Drnovsek, 2009; Simms

& Robinson, 2009; Wry & York, 2015), but there has been little theorizing concerning
 -74-

which specific aspects of identity are relevant and how they might influence the

development and experience of being resourceful. Therefore, in the entrepreneurial

context in the transitional Chinese society, we beg the question: Why are some social

entrepreneurs able to utilize entrepreneurial resourcefulness more effectively and thus

overcome resource constraints? Which logic(s) should be prioritized considering what

conditional factors, and how social enterprises are able to address this challenge by

achieving an effective balance between the dual goals?

In addition to these theoretical gaps, empirical gaps surround the social

entrepreneurship domain; very limited empirical research exists to confirm the impact of

an entrepreneur’s identity structure on his or her actions. If we are to attempt to help

individuals and social entrepreneurs better understand and manage their dual logic

tension and balance, we need more insight into the pathways and constructs through

which role and personal identity impacts individuals themselves. Extending on Wry and

York (2015) and Simms and Robinson (2009), I argue that social entrepreneurs have

salient role identities that are ready to enact (“who I am”), and valued social and personal

identities (“who I want to be”) that are subjectively important and central to the

individuals, and these varied identities may be associated with either or both social

welfare and commercial logics (Stryker, 2008; Thornton & Ocasio, 2008).

This study stands to make several contributions. First, I contribute to the social

entrepreneurship literature by presenting identity-based resource mobilization framework

for ventures that inherently need to balance social missions and financial missions, a key

feature of public interest entrepreneurship. Our study builds new theory specific to the

context of social entrepreneurship rather than just reapplying existing theories of

 -75-

entrepreneurship. An identity theory lens provides useful insights into where

resourcefulness might emerge and what factors play a role in influencing its growth.

Though previous scholars have posited that identities may influence social entrepreneurs’

behaviors (Cardon et al., 2009; Simms & Robinson, 2009; Wry & York, 2015), work

exploring the specific links between identity configuration and entrepreneurial behavior

(e.g., resourcefulness, bricolage, effectuation) has yet to be undertaken. Identities are not

simple, monolithic constructs (Cardon et al., 2009; Murnieks, Mosakowski, & Cardon,

2014). They are composed of many intricate factors, and in this study, I theorize how the

structuring of identity and logics may be one of the critical elements that affect

entrepreneurs’ cognition and behavior. By analyzing the level of resourcefulness of

individual social entrepreneurs, the study provides useful insights for future research into

the identity factors residing within the self-concept that might be responsible for the

growth or decay of social venture. Second, the model noted the relevance of social

context for entrepreneurial behavior and the application of identity theory might shed

light on the mechanisms by which a social milieu creates a foundation for resourcefulness

via self- image, and study findings here could complement and augment existing

interactionist models that pose entrepreneurial resourcefulness as a complex product of

identity and situation. Evidence from the emerging economy of China would contribute

to our knowledge concerning its unique institutional environments. Figure 3 depicts our

theoretical model for the influences of identity configuration, perceived social support

and resourcefulness among social entrepreneurs.

In the sections that follow, I begin to address these needs by drawing from existing

theoretical work concerning identity in general (Stryker, 1980, 2008; Stryker & Burke,
 -76-

2000) as well as entrepreneurial resourcefulness (Baker & Nelson, 2005; Bradley, 2015;

Desa & Basu, 2013; Di Domenico et al., 2010; Powell & Baker, 2014) specifically. I

integrate these theoretical frames with tenets from identity theory (Stryker, 1968; Stryker

& Burke, 2000) to develop a model of the specific identity factors that may influence a

social entrepreneur’s resourcefulness, and I propose the pathways through which the

environmental conditional factor moderate the identity and resourcefulness relation. I

then test the model using a sample of 499 Chinese social entrepreneurs. Finally, we

present our empirical study and results that support this model and offer a discussion of

our findings.

Figure 3 Hypothesized Model of Resourcefulness

2. THEORY AND HYPOTHESES

2.1 Understanding Identity

Because there is so much diversity in theoretical approaches to identity, the concept

of ‘identity’ has rich and complex meaning (Fiol, Pratt, & O'Connor, 2009; Petriglieri,

2011; Pratt & Foreman, 2000). By drawing on identity theory (Stryker, 1980; Stryker &
 -77-

Burke, 2000) and social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979), I first delineate and

clarify the terms of role identity, personal identity, and social identity.

Role identity. People occupy various positions and are involved in multiple social

relationships, and thus are expected to play different roles under different circumstances

(Stets & Burke, 2000). An individual’s understanding of a role is shaped by social

interactions with others who carry and express a set of specific behavioral norms and

expectations, and when those behavioral standards are internalized and identified by the

individual, they form the basis of a role identity (Stryker, 1980; Stryker & Burke, 2000).

Individuals, therefore, shape their behavior to seek confirmation of valued roles through

attempts to “elicit validating responses from others” (Stryker, 1980:63) by means of

positive “reflected appraisals” (Gecas & Burke, 1995:51). In other words, a role identity

of the individual reflects the self-view or meaningfulness she/he attributes to oneself to

that particular role (Burke & Tully, 1977), a role that is generated through reflexively

examining the perceived appearance to self and others and the effect based on such

examination (McCall & Simmons, 1978). For example, a teacher cares for the students;

she is confirming to herself and others that he is a teacher.

Further, the self-concept consists largely of the various social roles in which an

individual engages (Farmer, Tierney, & Kung-Mcintyre, 2003; Piliavin & Callero, 1991),

but the strength of the relationship to each role is not equally the same. Some identities

are more central to that individual and reflect how committed an individual is to that role,

and such commitment brought by identity centrality has been shown to play a significant

role in how individuals behave in organizations (Ashforth & Mael, 1989; Burke, 1991;

Burke & Reitzes, 1981). As a specific role becomes closely tied to an individual’s sense

of self or identity, that is being salient to the individual, such identity confers strong
 -78-

internal and external accountability pressures and requires individual to behave in line

with this role identity in order to verify the important self-meanings and enact specific

sets of social relations (Riley & Burke, 1995; Stryker, 1980; Stryker & Burke, 2000). In

the case of a social entrepreneur, which identity is more salient may evoke contentious

identification path when processing self-related information (Simms & Robinson, 2009).

The generation of a salient role identity reflects not only a self-regulatory

interpretative process of sense-making (Riley & Burke, 1995), but also a competent

enactment and development of focused knowledge and competencies around the role

(Dokko, Wilk, & Rothbard, 2009; Wry & York, 2015). In the end, after a complex

interpretation and reconciliation of relevant inputs from others and oneself, a role identity

emerges and embodies an internalized set of role standards and expectations. Through the

process of verifying, supporting, and validating the identity, a salient role identity helps to

answer the fundamental question of ‘who am I’ and ‘what I do’ (McCall & Simmons,

1978; Powell & Baker, 2014; Simms & Robinson, 2009; Stets & Burke, 2000; Stryker,

1989), and provides guidelines broadly on how to behave, and also a foundation

specifically for the formation of deep professional and role-related peer relations (Chua,

Ingram, & Morris, 2008; Farmer et al., 2003).

Personal identities. Personal identities refer to that part of an individual’s self-

concept, which derives from his characteristics, experiences, attributes, and values that

jointly distinguish oneself from others (e.g., being a caring or risk-averse person) (Deaux,

1991; Hitlin, 2003). According to Hitlin (2003), core personal identities entail beliefs

about desirable behaviors that are experienced as fundamental meaningful to one's self-

definition and create feelings of authenticity and personal fulfillment when enacted. That
 -79-

being said, the behavioral expectations of a valued personal identity may be quite broad

such as "liberal," or narrower, such as “communal harmonious," and the enactment and

validation of these personal identity are contingent upon varied social contexts and

relationships. Cherished personal identity, thus, also responds largely to the question of

"who I want to be" (social identity has also been argued to answer this question (Powell

& Baker, 2014), which I will discuss in detail in the following part).

A salient personal identity reflects the individual’s ideological aspirations and

expresses how the individual envisions the ‘self’ positioned in the future, which might be

something different than its current state and is based on the cherished values that the

individual is still pursuing (Hitlin, 2003; Powell & Baker, 2011). Thus, personal identities

are constructed not necessarily because of the role she performs, but more because her

idiosyncratic career path and the social context embedded (Burke, 2006; McCall &

Simmons, 1978). Personal identity, if central to the individual, will motivate the actor

either to customize a role to better resonate the values behind her central personal identity

(Ibarra, 1999), or to just adopt an aligned role (Hitlin, 2003). For example, a person who

labels herself as “environmentally friendly” will likely act as such as in her food

consumer identity, and may also adopt roles such as “green activist” that fits with her

personal identity (Stets & Biga, 2003; Stets & Carter, 2012).

Moreover, compared with role identities which the social relations and the

corresponding social cues and expectations are much certain and identifiable, personal

identity’s behavioral standards is oftentimes a value-laden judgment call for each specific

individual, and as such, the knowledge, competencies and social relations are likely to be

ostensibly less instrumental or scattered disproportionally among each personal identity

 -80-

(Stets & Biga, 2003). However, it should also be noted that valued personal identities

may be suppressed by the individual’s salient role identity, or in other words, those

identities are incongruent and therefore casting distress for the actor. For example,

Foreman and Whetten (2002) found that the incongruities between “business owner role”

and “family caring” identities negatively impacts both member commitment and

organizational legitimacy. Glynn (2000), in his research on cultural institutions, has

likewise shown that conflict between "artist role” and “economic sustainable” identities

can arise when one identity is emphasized over another. In each case, tension from the

hybrids of multiple identities cast balancing pressure and cognitive inertial enactment for

the individual (Smith & Woods, 2014; Smith et al., 2013).

Social identity. The third set of identities commonly discussed in the literature is

social identities, the fundamental construct of social identity theory (Ashforth & Mael,

1989; Hogg & Terry, 2000; Tajfel & Turner, 1986). Identity theory (role identity as core)

and social identity theory (social identity as core) have been historically identified as

competing theories and not easily reconciled due to their theoretical base (Hogg, Terry, &

White, 1995). An emerging stream of research has been conducted to combine those two

perspectives to complement each other and jointly contribute to the social psychological

theory (Ashforth , 2001; Ireland & Webb, 2007; Powell & Baker, 2014; Stets & Burke,

2000). A clear understanding of their respective theoretical assumptions and

terminologies would help to avoid the confusion.

Social identity is “that part of an individual’s self-concept which derives from his

knowledge of his membership of a social group (or groups) together with the value and

social significance attached to that membership (Tajfel, 1978:63)”. Thus, the most
 -81-

prominent difference is the basis of self-classification, where the role and the embedded

expectation serve as the basis for identification in identity theory (McCall & Simmons,

1978), and a particular social group/category serves as the basis for self-categorization in

social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1986). In other words, social identities are based

on collective membership such as organizational affiliation (e.g., church or union

membership) or social categories such as ethnicity and gender (Thoits & Virshup, 1997),

and thus having a particular social identity means “being at one with a certain group,

being like others in the group, and seeing things from the group’s perspective” in order to

enhance the evaluation of the in-group (self-esteem) relative to the out-group (Stets &

Burke, 2000:226). Such emphasis on the uniformity of perceptions and behaviors

(prototype) represents another key point of social identity theory that the group-based

identities (i.e., social identities) neither needs nor excludes interactions with members in

or associated with the group because group formation is just the result of unifying and

mutual reinforcing perception (Stets & Burke, 2000). Recalling the definition of role

identity, the emphasis is not on the similarity or unison of behavior with others in the

same role (although roles are frequently regarded as meaningful social categories), but on

the individuality and interrelatedness with others in the group or interaction context.

The difference, as well as the connection between social identity and role identity

can also be interpreted as the different conceptualization of group by the researchers of

each side, though not all roles are tied intimately to a group (e.g., husband and wife).

Social identity theorists tend to regard the group as a collective of persons who identify

with each other based on the similar views of "being" to contrast with members of out-

groups (inter-group relations). On the other hand, identity theorists conceptualize the
 -82-

group as a set of interrelated individuals, individuals that were seeing things from her

own unique angle but performing interrelated activities and negotiating for their roles of

interaction (intra-group relations) (Stets & Burke, 2000). As such, both inter and intra

relations are influential on the individual’s perception and behavior, and individual’s

salient identities are oftentimes both social and role-based (Ashforth, 2001; Powell &

Baker, 2014), therefore it’s hard, if possible, to separate role identity from group identity

as one always and simultaneously occupies a role and belongs to a group (Ashforth,

2001; Thoits & Virshup, 1997).

However, integration of role and social identity is beyond the scope of this

dissertation. In my model, I follow the track of identity theory (IDT) to explore role

enactment of an individual while maintaining the complex interrelatedness of social

structure (Stryker, 2008). Specifically, I use role identity to embody ‘who am I’ and the

readiness to activate and coordinate the resources of the current role or the prior role, and

personal identity to exemplify ‘who I want to be’ and the corresponding subjective

importance to the individual as motivating actor.

2.2 Identities and Aligned Logics

As discussed in previous sections, identities are broadly defined as meaningful

classifications that people apply to themselves and others as role player (e.g., role

identities: entrepreneur, social worker, investor), group members (e.g., social identities:

feminist, Asian American) and individuals (e.g., personal identities: caring, wealth,

power). The commonality underlying all these sets of self-definition is that they provide

the individual with behavioral guideline/standard and cognitive schema that reflect
 -83-

commonly accepted social expectations (Stryker, 1980; Stryker & Burke, 2000). And this

internal rationalization mechanism resonates organically with external legitimacy pattern

of institutional logic (Lok, 2010; Thornton & Ocasio, 2008).

Institutional logics, which are defined as sets of material practices, values, beliefs,

and norms, describing “the rules of the game” at the societal level, which in turn shape

beliefs and behavior of organizations (Dunn & Jones, 2010; Hayes & Robinson, 2011;

Thornton & Ocasio, 2008; Thornton et al., 2012). Individually, institutional logics

rationalize legitimacy of particular values and goals and offer coherent prescriptions for

action (Smith et al., 2013; Wry & York, 2015). Therefore, identities are affiliated with

institutional logics and instantiate the path through which these values and goals are

pursued (Creed , DeJordy, & Lok, 2010; Lok, 2010). In other words, identity is often

associated with certain type of institutional logic, and that the enactment of institutional

logic is finalized through identity activation, and if this identification is deep and broad

enough, such identity dynamic can, in turn, transform institutional arrangement (Glynn,

2008; Rao, Monin, & Durand, 2003).

However, each logic is represented and supported by distinct institutional structures

and such varied and often conflicting prescriptions increase the environmental

uncertainty and ambiguity (Greenwood et al., 2011; Pache & Santos, 2010). Social

enterprise, struggling for dual goals, is the typical organizational form that embeds those

competing logics within its core features (Battilana & Dorado, 2010; Besharov & Smith,

2012). Most relevantly and prominently, institutional scholars have framed social

enterprise as a hybrid that combines conflicting social welfare and commercial logics

(Battilana & Dorado, 2010; Battilana & Lee, 2014; Battilana et al., 2014; Battiliana et al.,
 -84-

2012; Besharov & Smith, 2014; Jay, 2013). Specifically, the social welfare logic focuses

on improving the welfare and general wellbeing of society, whereas a commercial logic

put profit, efficiency, and operational effectiveness as the central goals (Battiliana et al.,

2012; Pache & Santos, 2010; Smith et al., 2013). Thus, the key assumption here is that

social entrepreneurs prioritize values and goals from the institutional logics to align with

their salient identities, and variation occurs when the actors are socialized into favor

certain type of logic (social welfare vs. commercial) and pursue the goal accordingly

(Battilana et al., 2014; Pache & Santos, 2010).

In their recent theoretical paper, Wry and York (2015) attempt to link specific role

identities and personal identities to both social welfare and commercial logics, and this

results in a 2x2 table (table 3), representing different types of social entrepreneurs based

on their different identity configuration (i.e., role and personal identity variously aligned

with commercial or social welfare logics). As they reviewed the literature for role

identities, clergy, community organizer, parent, social worker, and teacher have been tied

to the social welfare logic; an accountant, a corporate lawyer, manager, and venture

capitalist align with commercial logic. As for personal identities, social welfare logic has

been found to include benevolence, caring, environmental protection, and social justice,

and commercial logic is tied closely to power, wealth, and hedonism. Using this typology

of the social entrepreneur as the starting point, I extend their model to discuss how the

difference in identity configuration would affect social entrepreneur’s resourcefulness,

and what the role does institutional environment play in this process.

Table 3 Identity Configurations

(Adapted from Wry and York, 2015)
 -85-

Identities associated with the Commercial logic

Role Identities Personal Identities

Accountant, Wealth, power, and
corporate lawyer, hedonism
manager, management
consultant, venture
capitalist, prior
entrepreneur
Role Identities Balanced Mixed: Social Welfare
Clergy, parent,
non-profit Knowledge, Knowledge,
Identities associated with the

executive, social competencies, and social competencies, and social

worker, teacher, relationships: Similar and relationships: Deeper and
Social welfare logic

social activist strong for both more focused for social

commercial and social welfare logic
welfare logics

Personal Identities Mixed: Commercial Social enterprise

Social justice, creation unlikely
benevolence, Knowledge, competencies,
equality, care for and social relationships: Knowledge, competencies,
the environment Deeper and more focused and social relationships:
for commercial logic Similar, but weak for both
logics
 -86-

2.3 Resource Constraint Facing Social Entrepreneurs

In this study, we employ Mair and Marti’s (2006:37) definition of social

entrepreneurship as ‘a process involving the innovative use and combination of resources

to pursue opportunities to catalyze social change and/or address social needs.’ Heeding

the argument proposed by Austin et al. (2006) that entrepreneurship consists of both

commercial and social dimensions, this paper follows that social entrepreneurship is a

subset of the broader field of entrepreneurship and complementary to commercial

entrepreneurship. Indeed, social and commercial entrepreneurship can be regarded as the

two extremes of the entrepreneurship continuum (Meier and O’Toole, 2011; Dees, 1998).

As a result, the problem of resource constraints, facing most entrepreneurial ventures, is

likely to be more significant in social ventures. The reasons are as follows.

To begin with, it is virtually impossible and even deemed unethical for a dually

motivated social enterprise to use their services or products to charge customers and

promote sales in pursuit of the biggest profits. While commercial enterprises are free to

venture into the capital markets and distribute its generated profits through incentives like

stock shares, social enterprises are prohibited from any operation of the kind, and, instead,

encouraged to focus more on their non-for-profit activities (Mair & Marti, 2006, 2009;

Seelos et al., 2011). In other words, compared with commercial enterprises, social ones

are not as enticing to employees with aspirations of making a fortune through their

professional expertise (Austin et al., 2006). As a result, they have to provide services to

the society while maintaining its daily business operations with the limited resources at

their disposal.
 -87-

The other factor that has a huge influence on the accessible resources of social

ventures is the macro-environment (Desa & Basu, 2013), which consists of its own

location, local population, the social, political, economic conditions of the region, as well

as the technological advances (Hambrick, 1983; Tushman & Anderson, 1986). In

addition, when social enterprises organize expeditions internationally, they may face two

kinds of challenges: serious shortages of resources and accesses to them (Neck et al.,

2009), and starkly different legislative and moral norms (Desa, 2012; Zahra et al., 2008).

When it comes to local recruitment and internal training, social enterprises have to take

into account the macro-environmental factors, such as local education, political trends,

economic status, business potential and, above all, the employee base (e.g., Hmieleski

and Baron, 2009).

2.4 Linking Identity Configuration to Resourcefulness

Resourcefulness has been used to describe how entrepreneurs, especially those who

have fewer resource endowments, were able to outmaneuver the established competitors

(Baker & Nelson, 2005; Bradley, 2015; Ganz, 2000; Powell & Baker, 2011). However,

the issue of resource constraints becomes even more significant for social

entrepreneurship because of both its internal tension to meet both social and financial

goals and its external plural and complex institutional arrangements (Desa , 2012; Desa &

Basu, 2013; Di Domenico et al., 2010). Thus, the challenge for the social entrepreneur is

how to build up and nurture their capacity to innovate when facing more severe resource

constraint and legitimacy tension compared with their pure commercial counterpart.
 -88-

As a core representative of resourcefulness, the notion of ‘bricolage’ (Baker &

Nelson, 2005; Garud & Karnøe, 2003), which has been defined as “making do by

applying combinations of resources at hand to new problems and opportunities (Baker &

Nelson, 2005:333)”, has been validated as theoretically appropriate and applicable to

understanding of social venture creation (Desa, 2007; Desa & Basu, 2013; Di Domenico

et al., 2010; MacMaster , Archer, & Hirth, 2014; Zahra et al., 2009). Social bricoleurs

develop novel combinations of ideas, knowledge, and forms of organizing to create the

order of the materials at hand (Mair & Marti, 2009; Weick, 1993), and such strategy has

been argued as an instrumental mechanism for SE to respond to unpredictable

circumstances (Ciborra, 1996). Connections with other processes such as bootstrapping

(Bhide, 1992), effectuation (Sarasvathy, 2001), improvisation (Baker et al., 2003;

Hmieleski et al., 2013) have also been discussed in the literature to specify the boundary

of bricolage (MacMaster et al., 2014).

Admittedly, making do with limited resources at hand (i.e., bricolage) and

manipulating personal finances or operating on business cash flow (i.e., bootstrapping)

are important predictors of resourcefulness of social entrepreneur, creatively acquiring

and managing traditional (e.g., financial) and non-traditional (e.g., stakeholder,

persuasion) resources constitutes another dimension of resourcefulness that are germane

to social entrepreneurship (Di Domenico et al., 2010; Di Domenico, Tracey, & Haugh,

2009). In other words, a resourceful social entrepreneur is not only capable of tinkering

fallow resources, but also skillful of positioning and attracting necessary resources for the

growth of the firm. Thus, based on extant studies, I define resourcefulness in the social
 -89-

entrepreneurship context as learned repertoires of creative resource combination and

acquisition.

Salient identities of the entrepreneur are germane to his/her knowledge,

competencies and social relations (Benet -Martínez, Lee, & Leu, 2006; Beyer & Hannah,

2002; Dokko et al., 2009), and each of these is relevant to how the social entrepreneur

will behave resourcefully (e.g., selective bricolage) or less resourcefully (e.g., frugal

management) in dealing with novel problems. Therefore, I argue that identity

configuration of the social entrepreneur affect their engagement of resourceful behavior.

Hypothesis 1: The resourcefulness of social entrepreneur is related to the

identity configuration.

Balanced social entrepreneurs

Deep and focused knowledge associated with both logics enrich balanced social

entrepreneur’s repertories and thus making them more resourceful. Compared with mixed

social entrepreneurs whose salient role identities are associated with either commercial or

social welfare logic, balanced social entrepreneurs possess salient role identities that

speak to both logics. In other words, balanced social entrepreneurs are likely to be

similarly aware of and knowledgeable about issues, information, and environmental

dynamism in both business and social domains, making them sensitive to the context of

the social issue and prone to see previously unperceived solutions for a more effective

combination of resources to integrate both social and financial aims.

Though the external validating pressure for role identities are likely to be equally

strong from both institutional logics, the resulting multiple high-frequent iterations

between both logics offers the balanced social entrepreneur more chance to negotiate
 -90-

possible integration and reach for the optimal balance. Compared with mixed social

entrepreneurs who mainly concern external accountability from the given logic that

associated with their single salient role identity, their feedback loop is often single-

directed and restricted. In other words, balanced social entrepreneurs have feedbacks

from the dual identity groups and therefore are more likely to take advantage of this

unique position, and more willing to take challenging problems and test progressively

more creative integration attempts.

Having salient role identities in both logics also help the balanced social

entrepreneurs to enlarge their ‘trove' to create and make use of networks and social

relationship from both role categories and to locate significant actors to leverage the

acquisition of new resources and support. Meanwhile, keeping roles across logics further

provides the balanced social entrepreneur's unique advantage to create and make use of

their multiple roles more discretionarily (e.g., one may use his church member role to

mobilize resources for entrepreneurial initiative) (Halme, Lindeman, & Linna, 2012).

Since she/he constantly and actively involves in integrating both social and financial

aspect of the opportunity, a balanced social entrepreneur, presumably, is better equipped

than the mixed social entrepreneur to translate the social entrepreneurial opportunity in

front of different stakeholders who aligned with different logic in order to get better

external acknowledgment.

Hypothesis 1a: Balanced social entrepreneurs are more likely to engage

in resourcefulness to develop innovative activities than both mixed-commercial

entrepreneurs and mixed-social welfare entrepreneurs.

Mixed social entrepreneurs

 -91-

Prior work roles that are related to business processes make mixed-commercial

entrepreneur more aware of the importance of an entrepreneurial orientation in the

process of venture creation and innovation. While those mixed-social welfare

entrepreneurs might be mentally constrained and therefore less resourceful because their

prior work roles are often more stable and routinized and the accumulated experience is

more about certainty rather than uncertainty. Mixed-commercial entrepreneurs are also

more likely, than the mix-social welfare entrepreneurs, to test the limitation boundaries

and refuse to be constrained by pervading environmental constraints because the

mentalities such as risk-taking and proactiveness are embedded in their salient role

identities associated with business logic. On the other hand, salient role identities

associated with social welfare logic emphasize more on the ‘human' and ‘social' side of

the matter and less on the efficiency and creativity of taking an initiative. Additionally, a

strong external accountability of social welfare logic may also exert conforming pressure

on the individual and increase the resistance to think out of the job description and the

comfort zone, and thus limiting their potential resourcefulness.

Hypothesis 1b: Mixed-commercial entrepreneurs are more likely to engage

in resourcefulness than mixed-social welfare entrepreneurs.

2.5 The Moderating Influence of Stakeholder Alignment

Social entrepreneurship, from a social structuration perspective (Nicholls & Cho,

2006), is a process resulting from the continuous interaction between social entrepreneurs

and the context in which they and their activities are embedded (Mair & Marti, 2006;

Seelos et al., 2011). Among the most crucial context factors, the alignment of
 -92-

stakeholders in SE ventures regarding the concurrent creation of social and economic

value is arguably more proximal to social entrepreneurs’ decisions making process and

actions than non-immediate elements (e.g., national culture), and thus may be more

consequential for the entrepreneurial process (Di Domenico et al., 2010; Smith & Woods,

2014; Townsend & Hart, 2008).

Stakeholder relationship is gaining increasing importance in management studies

both theoretically and practically (Freeman, 2010). In the case of social entrepreneurship,

key community stakeholders (e.g., local government, financiers and community groups)

are often playing the center role in generating support for SE’s planned strategies and

projects (Di Domenico et al., 2010; Mair & Marti, 2006). Those groups of parties

certainly affect the ventures that are closely related and simultaneously affected by these

ventures in evolving the attitudes and postures. A proper management of stakeholders is

said to be critical to the survival and future growth of the firm (Donaldson & Preston,

1995; Gimeno, Folta, Cooper, & Woo, 1997), but before such benefits can be fully

derived, stakeholders must have a clear understanding of the SE and fundamentally buy

into the double bottom-line concept of the venture (Eikenberry & Kluver, 2004;

Townsend & Hart, 2008). However, some stakeholders may have concerns about the

appropriateness of making “earned income” through a prosocial mission and the

feasibility of a double bottom-line model given the potentially competing demands for

the use of the generated profits.

 -93-

Whether the venture creation is a social mission-oriented for-profit or a business-

oriented nonprofit entity, the essential commonality is to pursue the double- (or triple1-)

bottom-line (Robinson, 2006). For those stakeholders involved with nonprofit SE

ventures, their clear understanding of the double bottom-line concept is critical since the

SE will have to divert some of its resources that would otherwise be used towards

pursuing the social goals of the firm to maintain self-sustainability both fiscally and

professionally. Though the external stakeholders might be eligible to receive some

tangential benefits such as tax deductions, publicity, etc., the direct financial benefit from

the organization is disallowed. In the same vein, stakeholders associated with for-profit

SE ventures must have a crystal understanding of the double bottom-line model to be

willing to allow some of their endorsement to be diverted towards pursuing social goals,

and to be tolerable enough to know that such diversion of capital oftentimes may not

necessarily maximize and benefit returns to their investments (Townsend & Hart, 2008). I

argue that the extent to which the social entrepreneur perceive their key stakeholders'

willingness and commitment to forgo short-term returns for the long-term effectiveness

of the double bottom-line would impact social entrepreneurs’ resourcefulness through

interfering their felt tension and prominence of identity conflict due to straddling on dual

logics.

1
Double Bottom Line (DBL) and Triple Bottom Line (TBL) are performance measures aiming at advance

sustainability in business practices, in which the focus of companies is extended beyond profits to include social and

environmental issues to measure the total cost of doing business. The two bottom lines in DBL are financial and social

dimensions. The three pillars in the TBL are people, planet, and profit, capturing social, environmental, and economic

impact respectively.
 -94-

In the case of social entrepreneurship, resolution of the identity conflict hinges on

how efficiently the social entrepreneur constructs her idiosyncratic repertoire of

“negotiating, modifying, developing, and shaping expectations through interaction”

(Burke, 2003:198) between groups of valued identities, and thus transforming the new

role identity through the collective understanding of the behavior expectations that span

social activist and entrepreneurial business role and the interaction of both. Notably, this

transformation constantly refers to the socially situated context and involves participatory

behaviors that inform what is fitting and appropriate in order to build up the equilibrium.

Thus, an environment in which various community actors and key stakeholders, from

local investors, through government, to community groups, explicitly and actively

support and endorse social entrepreneurial initiatives is likely to expedite this

transformation process by providing clear social cues and facilitating social

entrepreneur’s cognitive negotiating process to alleviate emotional stress of reconciling

the formerly irreconcilable identity conflict.

Additionally, current societal norms have greatly shifted from perceptions of solely

maximizing shareholder wealth to the recognition of social and obligations of firms

(Baron, 2007; Van Slyke & Newman, 2006). In other words, even those stakeholders,

who are fundamentally profit-driven, are also very much likely to sacrifice some

economic returns to satisfy and conform to the mainstream normative values towards

social obligations of the firm. However, variation exists regarding their commitment and

persistence of willingness to make such sacrifice in a constant manner supporting the

social ventures. An additional situation is also worthy of consideration is from a strategic

competitive advantage point of view that once the concomitant focus on social and
 -95-

economic value creation of the specific SE has been accepted and espoused by the

general public and followed by consumers’ consistent preference for such goods and/or

services, such firm might have a higher chance to create a resource-based advantage

based on uniquely positioning the double bottom-line focus. In this case, stakeholders are

eagerly associate with and actively participate in exploiting opportunities in SE ventures

due to the public goodwill the SE attracts, rather than passively making tradeoffs for the

sake of social obligation discussed in previous scenario (Baron, 2007; Mackey, Mackey,

& Barney, 2007).

In either case, the display of strong support by key stakeholders and community

actors offers the social entrepreneurs not only the access to both tangible (e.g. finance,

raw materials) and intangible (e.g. information, emotional support) resources in a

practical sense, but also a thrust to liberate their mind to accommodate the conflicting

part to form a new collective understanding of the balance between a social welfare role

and entrepreneurial business role. Specifically, the more social entrepreneurs perceive the

commitment of supporting and accepting the double bottom-line model of the SE from

key external stakeholders, the more reconciling and accommodating their attitude

towards the identity conflict because such perception gives them a hint that a negotiated

identity is not only possible but also socially endorsed (Burke, 2003).

During the process of venturing, especially that of social entrepreneurs who contend

and struggle to maintain the dynamic between social and economic goals, if external

stakeholders don’t fully buy into their model, the social entrepreneurs may need to spend

more time and efforts to interpret the dual focus model in a way that make sense to them,

and this is especially challenging if the stakeholder holds an inertia to the status quo and
 -96-

hostile to newness such as a hybrid form of organizing. Therefore, the cognizance of ‘I

am not alone’ and ‘support is out there’ is crucial to pacify their psychological strain

embedded in the identity conflict and tension because of dual logics, and reassure them to

forge ahead resourcefully regardless of ongoing and impending uneasiness. Further, a

high level of perceived stakeholder commitment may also enhance individuals’

entrepreneurial self-efficacy, which empowers them with confidence and latitude to

experiment and try out various methods without fearing breaking the existing stereotype

that has labeled the hat of ‘social entrepreneur’, to define and dispatch those opaque

identity intersection, and to become faithfully that they have the abilities to conquer the

challenges.

To sum up, higher level of key stakeholders’ commitment to support SE’s hybridity

nature would allow greater tolerance for trial and error, help social entrepreneur speed up

the renegotiation process of dual identity conflict and reach the consensus, create

discretion around response strategies testing the institutional barriers, and be more

assertive in defining new rule of game through resourcefulness. Thus, I propose that the

perceptions of stakeholder commitment, namely the state of being dedicated to support

the form of social enterprise from local government, financiers, and local groups, will

moderate the relationship between identity configuration and resourcefulness such that

when the social entrepreneur perceives strong stakeholder commitment and support to

their SE course, they are more encouraged to behave entrepreneurially and innovatively

through resourcefulness, because the value incongruence from identity configuration may

become less prominent and stressful and a higher legitimacy and normative approval is

conveyed by means of such perception. However, it is noted that this moderating effect
 -97-

may not be significant for the balanced social entrepreneurs, because they concurrently

possess salient role identities from both social welfare logic and business logic, meaning

that their grasps of knowledge, expertise, and social relations from both domains are

likely to be equally strong, and thus they maybe cognitively more capable of resolving

and negotiating conflicts through resourcefulness and related activities such as higher

order of reasoning (Wry & York, 2015), and therefore the effect of perception of

environmental factor weakens. In formal terms:

Hypothesis 2: The relationship between identity configuration and

engagement of resourcefulness is positively moderated by the commitment of

key external stakeholders to the double bottom-line focus of an SE venture.

However, such moderating effect is stronger for the mixed type of social

entrepreneurs than for the balanced social entrepreneurs.

3. METHODOLOGY

3.1 Research Design

In the first stage, I used a focus group and interviews to refine constructs and their

interrelations for their applicability to the Chinese culture (see Berry, 1990), and this also

helps develop a greater understanding of the role of identity configuration and perceived

institutional factors within social enterprises. Appendix D provides a brief description of

the 10 social enterprises from which I gathered data from informants. All these surveyed

enterprises are located in different provinces and regions throughout China. I adopted the

purposive sample in order to reveal certain common patterns in operations of the studied

units under various conditions and restrictions of resources. Doing so was conducive to
 -98-

the extraction of theories, overcoming the limitation of critical or similar samples. By

checking their previous and current work roles (besides being a “social entrepreneur”),

I’m able to categorize and label entrepreneurs 1) as balanced social entrepreneur if she/he

holds/held multiple work roles aligned with both business logic and social welfare logic,

and meanwhile she/he identifies that role(s) as salient to her/him, 2) as mixed-

commercial entrepreneur if current or previous work roles are found only to be associated

with either business logic or social welfare logic, and meanwhile their business role

identity is salient, 3) and as mixed-social welfare entrepreneur if roles are found only to

be related to social welfare logic and meanwhile their business role identity is relatively

less salient.

These structured interviews were conducted either in person or by telephone.

Founders or CEOs of these enterprises were involved in several interviews organized in a

semi-structured manner. They were selected as interviewees of this research due to their

overall comprehension of each enterprise’s features, behaviors, and strategies (Miller &

Toulouse, 1986). In addition, questions in a general sense were raised during the

interviews coupled with prompts aimed at supplementing the questions and obtaining

more information from them (Creswell, 2003). Probes were proposed to help investigate

critical factors intensively mentioned in the interviews. A total of ten in-depth interviews

indicated that the construct definitions for identity configuration, resourcefulness,

perceived stakeholder commitment and the other study variables are semantically clear ad

culturally meaningful for the participants. Exact records and transcripts of the interviews,

along with related information and data of the enterprises, were documented during the

interviewing process so that they could serve as references for post-research inquiry.
 -99-

Coded names for the interviewees and enterprises were assigned for the sake of their

privacy.

For stage two, the online and paper survey were developed which was distributed

across social entrepreneurship networks, social entrepreneurship incubators and

supporting institutes, and social media groups. I created English survey items that could

be easily translated into Mandarin Chinese and adjusted wordings to make items more

concrete and less hypothetical. To improve the reliability and validity of survey items,

back translation is conducted (Brislin, 1970, 1986) in which the translated Chinese

version is retranslated back to English by two independent bilingual individuals, and we

repeat the process to ensure convergence among the translations is satisfactory. Pilot

study for the instrument was first conducted with several Chinese individuals, debriefing

question-by-question for understanding and wording issues. Minor change has been made

for item accuracy, and then the instruments were given to a sample of 10 social

entrepreneurs for additional pretesting, and then the instrument was finalized.

3.2 Sample and Data Collection

Firstly, the sample selection follows the national context in China. Social welfare

enterprises, private non-enterprise units, cooperatives, and some companies that have

been registered in the business sector but engaged in public benefit activities are all

included in the sample range. Although there is no relevant law or regulation for defining

the categories and behaviors of social enterprises in China, the above social enterprises

are most likely to be legally recognized. Social enterprises are related to traditional

commercial enterprises, but they are essentially different. On the one hand, both of them
 -100-

are enterprises that realize their own profits and losses through independent operation,

instead of non-profit, non-government or charitable social organizations that operate

depending on the donation from government, enterprises and the society. On the other

hand, there are essential differences in income distribution. The surplus of social

enterprises is not shared as traditional commercial enterprises did but used to create

social value in addition to necessary costs, which can be judged and monitored according

to financial information.

To get access to the sample, I firstly attended events and conferences where I could

meet social entrepreneurs in person in order to exchange our views on the venturing

process. After these candid conversations, many of the entrepreneurs and major

organizers agreed to join my research. Oftentimes, founders and core members of these

social enterprises coordinated with other social enterprises in their region to help to

implement the data collection. Secondly, I contacted several social entrepreneurship

network-building institutions in China to get access to social entrepreneurs, and all of

them are agreed to grant me the contact information of the nascent founders and provide

help if necessary. (Institutes includes: Shanghai Social Enterprise Research Center;

Shanghai NPI public welfare organization platform; Shenzhen Zheng Weining Charity

Foundation; Beijing Nandu Foundation; China Social Entrepreneurship and Social

Venture Capital Summit Forum). Snowball sampling is designed into the survey where

research respondents are asked to refer or identify other social entrepreneurs to

participate. I further screened according to sample selection criteria of the research to

guarantee the representativeness of the social enterprise samples. In this sample, social
 -101-

entrepreneurs serve a number of sectors, including environment, education, hunger, arts

and culture, mental health, and social capital investing.

Finally, the database includes 499 cases from two channels both the online and

offline, and collecting period is from March to December 2017. For the online part, I sent

out 1170 emails containing the survey link, and 302 have started the questionnaire (a

response rate of 25.8%). After data cleaning, the valid cases from online dropped to 111

(due to key information missing and inappropriate filling manners, an effective response

rate of 9.5%). For the offline part where we adopted face-to-face interviews, we have 388

useable questionnaires and 33 invalid ones. Another two colleagues from SERC

ShangHai and two researchers from NPI (Chengdu) have also helped to collect the survey

data. Combining the two parts, the total validity rate comes to 31.3%. Table 4

summarizes the details for the study sample of 499 social entrepreneurs.

The majority of the social ventures were registered in Commercial Form (36.5%)

and Civilian-Run Non-Enterprise Form (42.3%). Regarding their industrial sectors, 30.1%

of them are working in “Education”, 29.5% in “Other Community and Social Services”,

22.8% in “Business Services and Activity”, 11.8% in “Poverty Alleviation and Rural

Development”, 5.8% in “Environment and Health”. Concerning the size of the

organization, majority of the organizations have fewer than 5 full-time employees

(48.9%). Other demographic characteristics include Gender (“Male, 61.1%” and “Female,

38.9%”); Education (e.g., “University Degree, 54.3%”); Age Group (“20-29 year-old,

29.1%” and “30-39 year old, 41.7%”); Serial Entrepreneur (“Yes, 22.6%” and “No,

77.4%”). Regarding the gender ratio in these data, we reviewed the current literature of

Chinese entrepreneurship research (He, 2009; Shinnar, Giacomin, & Janssen, 2012;
 -102-

Warnecke, 2013), and our sample did not over represent male entrepreneurs. Though,

entrepreneurship in China and most developing countries remains heavily male-

dominated (Warnecke, 2013), our study is consistent with the current trend of increasing

levels of female entrepreneurship in many — though not all — countries around the

world (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2012). Furthermore, our cross-tab analysis did

not find a significant between-group difference among the three type of social

entrepreneur.

In order to minimize the potential effects of common method variance, we took

several procedures. First, in our explorative stage, pre-test of the survey instrument is

conducted with 10 social entrepreneurs who are not included in our final sample. In doing

so, we debriefed question-by-question for possible ambiguous items to make sure our

question is conceptually clear in this Chinese context and thus to helps to prevent the

respondents from developing their own idiosyncratic meanings for them. Second,

regarding the problem of social desirability and retrospective data, we made specific

statement in our questionnaire that there were no right or wrong answers and that their

responses were confidential. Additionally, we checked for common method bias using

Harman’s one- factor test. We use SPSS 22.0 to conduct a principal factor analysis of all

measurement items, showing the KMO measure is 0.87, and that the Chi-square for

Bartlett's test of sphericity is 3169.86 with a significant level at 0.000. Before rotation, 2

factors are extracted, and together accounted for 60.25 percent of the variance. Because

the first factor accounts for 46.99 percent of variance (less than half the variance

explained by the set of factors with eigenvalues greater than one), common method

variance is unlikely to be a serious problem in the data (Podsakoff and Organ, 1986).
 -103-

Table 4 Descriptive Statistics – Study Two

Demographic characteristics *N = 499

Organizational Form Items Frequency Rate
Commercial Registration 182 36.5%
Civilian-Run Non-enterprise
211 42.3%
Registration
Social org Registration 95 19%
Other 11 2.2%
Industrial Sector Items Frequency Rate
Business Services 114 22.8%
Rural Development 59 11.8%
Education 150 30.1%
Environment 29 5.8%
Social Services 147 29.5%
Full-time Employee Items Frequency Rate
≤5 244 48.9%
6~10 121 24.2%
11~19 49 9.9%
20~25 40 8%
＞25 45 9%
Gender Items Frequency Rate
Female 194 38.9%
Male 305 61.1%
Age Group Items Frequency Rate
20-29 145 29.1%
30-39 208 41.7%
40-49 91 18.2%
50-59 51 10.2%
Above 60 5 0.8%
Education Items Frequency Rate
Less than High School 5 1.0%
High School 22 4.4%
 -104-

Some College Degree 98 19.6%

University Degree 271 54.3%
Advanced Degree 102 20.4%
Other 1 0.2%
Work Experience (years) Items Frequency Rate
≤5 132 26.5%
6~10 84 16.8%
11~20 200 40.1%
＞20 83 16.6%
Serial Entrepreneur Items Frequency Rate
Yes 113 22.6%
No 386 77.4%

3.3 Variables and Measurement

Identity configuration of social entrepreneur

The construct of identity configuration includes both role identity and personal

identity elements. In assessing role identity, a role identity list is first created based on

existing literature where specific role identities have been indicated to align with either

commercial or social welfare logic (Battilana & Dorado, 2010; Cardon et al., 2005;

Glynn, 2000; Lounsbury , Ventresca, & Hirsch, 2003; Pache & Santos, 2010, 2013; Wry,

Lounsbury, & Jennings, 2014). If choosing role identities that the respondent possess or

has possessed, she will be required to indicate the self-felt importance of the specific role

identity. I adapted Callero’s (1985) role identity scale to measure the extent to which the

role of the entrepreneur or/and the prosocial person had been incorporated into self-

identity. This well-validated scale uses five-point Likert scaling for responses.

To operationalize the personal identity, I developed a scale using items from the

PSED questionnaire to capture the characteristics advanced by existing studies (Battilana

 -105-

et al., 2014; Besharov & Smith, 2014; Hitlin, 2003; Stets & Biga, 2003; Stets & Carter,

2012). Personal identities (in the form of values) that speak to social welfare logics and

commercial logics are validated. Specifically, the former include social justice

(“correcting injustice, care for the weak”), benevolence (“Enhance the well-being of

others”), Caring (“Improve community and society”), and environmental protection

(“Protect and Improve the environment”); on the other hand, identities related to wealth

(“Have financial security”), power (“Gain a higher status”), autonomy (“Be free to adapt

my approach to life”), pleasure (gratification of desires), and exciting life (“Get greater

flexibility for personal life ” align with the commercial logic. Rating is employed rather

than ranking to sustain more useful statistical properties, allow longer lists of values to be

included in the instrument, avoid forcing choices among values that might be equally

important In answering these questions, the focal point was the person, rather than a role

or position that one holds in the social structure (For items, please see the Appendix A).

Resourcefulness

Resourcefulness was considered in two ways – bricolage and community. Bricolage

borrows from the eight-items scale offered by Steffens, Senyard, and Baker (2009). This

is by far the first scale created to measure the original definition of entrepreneurial

bricolage by Baker and Nelson (2005). Social entrepreneurs will be asked to indicate the

degree to which, on a five-point response scale (1 = ‘never'; 5 = ‘always'), they behave in

doing things for the social venture. Guided by the exploratory research and made to apply

for the Chinese setting, we dropped four items because of translation problems. And to

capture the notion of creatively using and finding resources through building and

leveraging community networks (Starr & MacMillian, 1990; Brown & Duguid, 1991), I
 -106-

develop a 4-item scale to measure the construct of community. Specifically, the items

created to measure the ties of social enterprise with local government agencies, social

networks, and communities. In total, eight items were used for the construct of

resourcefulness, and the Cronbach’s alpha reliability is 0.88. (Appendix A)

Perceived key stakeholders’ commitment

Perceived key stakeholder’s commitment will be measured by adapting three items

from PSED's subjective community norm scale. The original scale comprises items on

perceptions of support of various community actors (e.g., government, bankers,

community groups, local media, etc.), all of which are consistent with the definition. This

construct is assessed on a five-point Likert response scale. In total four items were used,

with the Cronbach’s alpha of 0.84 across these four items. (Appendix A)

Control Variables

Similar to previous research (e.g., Salunke, Weerawardena, & McColl-Kennedy,

2013; Senyard et al., 2014), I controlled for other variables that could potentially affect

the outcome variable. First, I control a set of variables that assess the characteristics of

the firm. These include organizational registration form, industry effects, and size of the

organization. Second, I control variables that indicate the new founder’s resource

endowments. These include founder’s age and education level, years of working

experience, and entrepreneurial experience.

4. RESULTS

4.1 Correlations
 -107-

Correlation analysis shows that there are significant relationships between the

dependent variable-resourcefulness of the social entrepreneur and the major independent

variable- identity configuration. (Table 5)

 -108-

Table 5 Correlations between major variables – Study Two

4.2 Main Effects Test

The ANOVA analysis, group analysis, and hierarchical regression are used for the

hypothesis testing. First, the ANOVA test shows that the our main independent variable -

Identity configuration does have a significant effect on the DV, and the partial ETA

squared shows that identity configuration is accounted for 6.6 percent of the variance of

resourcefulness (H1 supported, Table 6). Table 7 presents the means of three types of

social entrepreneurs, and the balanced type of social entrepreneurs has the highest level

of resourcefulness, and such difference is statistically significant (p<0.01) (H1a

supported). Though mixed commercial type does have a higher mean than mixed social

type, such difference is not statistically significant, and thus our H1b is not supported.

(Table 8,9) In sum, compared to mixed commercial and mixed social type of social

entrepreneurs, balanced social entrepreneurs were more likely to engage in

resourcefulness in the social venturing process.

Table 6 ANOVA analysis of the Identity Configuration and Resourcefulness

 -109-

Table 7 ANOVA analysis of the Identity Configuration and Resourcefulness -

Mean Compare
 -110-

Table 8 ANOVA analysis of the Identity Configuration and Resourcefulness -F-test

Table 9 ANOVA analysis of the Identity Configuration and Resourcefulness

- Multiple Comparisons
 -111-

4.3 Moderation Effect

We used a linear hierarchical regression analysis with moderating effects to test the

hypotheses proposed (Table 10). Model 1 analyzes the influence of the control variables

and independent variable. They all explain with statistical significance 11.8 percent of the

variation in resourcefulness. Concerning the role of control variables, we can observe that

only the age is significant and negative. Such finding is interesting that social

entrepreneurs with older age are not less likely to engage in resourcefulness, namely, age

may limit their ability to make do with handy resources or may condition their mentality

to become resourceful in solving problems. Regarding the independent variables, we used

balanced type as the reference and putted both mixed commercial type and mixed social

type as two dummy variable. The results show that the unstandardized β coefficient is

negatively and statistically significant for the two dummy variables, indicating that

balanced social entrepreneur (the reference group) has a statistically higher level of

resourcefulness and confirming our first study hypothesis regarding identity

configuration.

Model 2 incorporates the interaction terms between identity configuration and two

dummy variables (mixed commercial and mixed social). We can observe that the

coefficients corresponding to the interaction term between resourcefulness and two

dummy variables are positive and statistically significant. The total explained variance of

the model significantly increases by 0.236 and reaches 0.354. Following Cortina et al.

(2001) , we generated an interaction plot (see Figure 4) using the standardized equation

with the Y-axis metric in standard deviations. Supporting Hypothesis 2, results showed

that the relation of identity configuration to resourcefulness is augmented when social

 -112-

entrepreneur perceive that their stakeholder values their double bottom line model of

business. As the perceived stakeholder support grow, the between group difference

narrows, meaning a stronger positive moderating effect for mixed type social

entrepreneurs.

Table 10 Results of the Regression for Resourcefulness

 -113-

Figure 4 Interaction of Identity Configuration and Perceived Stakeholder Support for

Resourcefulness

5. DISCUSSIONS AND CONCLUSION

Research on social enterprise is crucial for understanding how entrepreneurship may

contribute to resolving severe societal challenges. However, the domain has limited

knowledge about how the seemingly conflicting social and financial aims can be

configured together as to be meaningful for the entrepreneur, and further make a

 -114-

difference in their behavior patterns. Providing a foundation to theorize about internal

tensions within the social enterprise, extant works calls for entrepreneurship frameworks

to be extended in ways that account for social enterprise (Dacin et al. 2010; Shepherd et

al. 2015; Shepherd 2015) through the integration of identity theory (Dacin et al., 2011;

Simms and Robinson, 2009). Arguably, the personal identities and salient role of the

actors relate to entrepreneurship and meanwhile may be associated with the logics of

social welfare and commercial business. Hence, it is necessary to understand the theory

that provides helpful insight since it attracts external feedback via social relationship, as

well as attention and assessment directly via competency and knowledge (Wry & York,

2015; Stryker & Burke, 2000); the key mechanisms of opportunity recognition and

resource combination as well as mobilization. In this paper, we developed an identity-

based model of social entrepreneurship that helps to explain the variation of strategic

behavior in terms of being resourceful, as well as the ways in which the entrepreneur’s

perceived environmental support may reconcile such relationship. We then empirically

test the model of hypotheses.

In general, the main hypotheses of our research model are supported, i.e., identity

configuration is significantly related to the social entrepreneur’s resourcefulness. The

moderation effect of perceived stakeholder commitment does exist, demonstrating that a

higher level of key stakeholders’ support to the SE’s hybridity nature play an important

role in helping social entrepreneur speed up the renegotiation process of dual identity

conflict, create discretion around response strategies testing the institutional barriers, and

be more assertive in defining new rule of game through resourcefulness.

Implications
 -115-

Major implications for theory and practices are summarized below. First, our model

moves toward developing a theoretical approach to explain the behavior of social

entrepreneurs, whereas much of the current SE literature has been centered around the

definitional issues of social entrepreneurship and has applied traditional entrepreneurship

theory to social entrepreneurs (Simms & Robinson, 2009). Our integrated model shows

how the relationship between an individual’s role and personal identities operate in the

social entrepreneurship context. The empirical findings offer insight into the importance

of specific identity configuration of social entrepreneurs in its impact on entrepreneurs’

resourceful activities in the process of venture creation. Our empirical results suggested

that this process may play out in different ways depending on the types of identities that

an entrepreneur holds, and the knowledge, competencies, and social relations that are

associated with each. Once an individual develops her/his identity configuration, such

structuring processes evolve, and their identities are further confirmed through the self-

categorization process. This cycle helps a social entrepreneur’s identity further develop

and ultimately provides a schema for that individual’s behavior. Our evidence shows that

balanced entrepreneurs (in comparison with mixed entrepreneurs who favor role over

personal identities), whose salient identities are associated with both logics, are more

likely to engage in creative integration attempts and creative resource combinations

through higher order integrative reasoning align each role. Though the mixed commercial

group has a higher mean for resourcefulness than that of the mixed social group, such

difference is not statistically significant, and therefore our Hypothesis 1b is not supported.

Our theoretical assumption that prior work role related to business processes can make

mixed-commercial entrepreneur more aware of entrepreneurial and innovative may have

 -116-

more conditional factors and need more nuances for the explanation. For example, our

data does not capture how long the individual has been in a particular role (Stryker &

Serpe, 1994; Simms & Robinson, 2009). People may spend different amount of time on

conforming to their salient identity, though those identities are all “salient”, the cognitive

schema maybe variously different for each and specific individual people. Thus, having a

salient role identity associated with business logic alone may not be enough to dictate

resourceful behavior more effectively.

Second, founder identity’s role in addressing the conflict has not been examined

whereas researches have indicated that internal strife between stakeholders who have

conflicting logics can be destructive (Besharov & Smith, 2014) or generative (Ashforth &

Reingen, 2014; Battilana et al., 2015). Our proposed model and empirical findings

complement research on how plural logics affect the entrepreneurs’ behavior pattern

through individual founder role and personal identities, presenting a complementary

mechanism on how organizations deal with institutional complexity. The traditional

legitimacy-seeking explanation may be informed by incorporating an understanding of

the entrepreneur’s salient identities and how this affects their approach to integrating

conflicting goals.

Third, the moderating effect of perceived commitment is stronger for the mixed type

of social entrepreneurs than for balanced social entrepreneurs. The finding confirms our

argument that higher level of key stakeholders’ commitment to support SE’s hybridity

nature would allow greater tolerance for trial and error, help social entrepreneur speed up

the renegotiation process of dual identity conflict and reach the consensus. Context

matters in general, but in the case of social entrepreneurship, we call for more attention
 -117-

on entrepreneurs’ perception of alignment of stakeholders of the SE ventures regarding

the concurrent creation of social and economic value, because such contextual factors is

arguably more proximal to their decisions making process and actions than non-

immediate elements (e.g., national culture), and thus may be more consequential for the

entrepreneurial process (Di Domenico et al., 2010; Smith & Woods, 2014; Townsend &

Hart, 2008).

Last but not least, for entrepreneurs, our finding suggests that a greater awareness of

their own salient identities, as well as how such identities affect behavior, could be a

critical consideration. Knowing ‘who we are and what we want’ is crucial because it not

only informs our behavior in the social environment but most importantly, it shapes our

perspective and provides a lens through which we view this world (Simms & Robinson,

2009). In our case, single-minded social welfare entrepreneurs may struggle to raise

resources due to their inability to pursue practices aligned with a commercial logic, and a

singular focus often limits the view. According to the identity theory, actors are very

reluctant to abandon salient identity and actually will do so under extreme circumstances

(Burke, 2004; Stryker & Burke, 2000). We argue that it is the overlap of both salient

prosocial and business identities that creates a unique vision that may give an

entrepreneur a competitive advantage by exposing an idea and resources others would not

recognize as instrumental and useful. Social entrepreneurship offers us a context where

individuals may be forced to confront the incongruence of their salient identities. Indeed

there is some benefit to training programs, entrepreneurship workshops, incubation

programs and the like, but such projects themselves are not enough to help individuals to

exploit opportunities, act entrepreneurially and resourcefully, and ultimately to assure

 -118-

business sustainability. Hence, greater identity awareness, by the individual himself,

plays even a bigger role in assisting entrepreneurs in spotting not only weaknesses in

their business models, but also gaps in their knowledge, competencies, and social

relationships. However, for many, it is their first time engaging in entrepreneurial

ventures, the cognitive schema for these individuals to begin to view themselves

primarily as entrepreneurs and behave as such is not readily available. Thus, we argued

that especially those from a traditional philanthropy mindset and thinking of switching to

an SE model, actors should construct a salient entrepreneur identity so that these

individuals can at least balance the prosocial and business identities in an attempt to

maximize the financial and social value created. It is important to find out methods and

ways to develop the self-schema systematically to generate and reinforce the two

identities related to business and prosocial logics. As a result, the breadth and width of

the perspectives position the entrepreneurs uniquely to highlight their potentials for

financial development and meanwhile create the most significant benefit simultaneously

for the largest group of people they hope to serve.

Future research and limitations

We hope that the proposed theoretical framework can help explain some of the

behaviors of social entrepreneurs and shed light for future research. As our results

indicated, social entrepreneurs may experience a conflict between their prosocial and

business identities, and the configuration of salience of that identity can influence the

way in which they can mobilize resources creatively. If mixed commercial and social

entrepreneurs are low resourceful in general, we might expect lower variance in the

performance of their organizations. Meanwhile, because balanced social entrepreneurs

 -119-

are more likely to be resourceful and aware of neglected resources, we would expect

them to create more unique business models and high variance in the performance of

their ventures. It is of great interest to ask if there is best identity configuration that can

address identity conflict effectively and contribute to the venture’s final success. If this

conflict does pose a problem and cannot be configured together in a compatible way,

what else factors should take into consideration about maintaining their focus on social

aims over time? Moreover, our research just emphasizes the business and social welfare

identities that constitute the identity of the social entrepreneur. It is essential to know

whether other parts of one’s self-definition can have effect on the behaviors and

cognition of a social entrepreneur (for instance, gender and race). To identify the

antecedents to a social entrepreneur’s behavior will further enrich our understanding of

the social entrepreneurship process. While our theory scratches the surface of these

implications, future research may move to predict whether these identities can be altered

and reconfigured to better ensure a venture’s success and to examine potential linkages

between founder identity on social impact generation and financial performance as well

as innovation for social enterprises.

In addition, while we focus on individual entrepreneurs, many ventures are co-

founded. This points out the necessity for the extra study on how the communication and

decision-making of a team may be affected by different kinds of identity configurations,

though the theory should be used in a founding team’s members. Furthermore, it is

important to know that as the passage of time, entrepreneurs might change through

typology and actor might use the identities of salient role in the area of social welfare or

commercial and thereby turn to the other sector. The length of time during which an actor
 -120-

holds a certain identity might influence the degree of knowledge and the competency

accrued by them via its establishment. We cannot explore the transactions in the present

thesis yet the examination of these would be a promising use of the theory in the study.

Like any research, this one is not exempted of limitations. The theory does not

distinguish between varieties of identities related to the dual logics of social or

commercial. However, there might be some differences in the level to which particular

identities can relate to a certain logic in real practice. Furthermore, there might be the

identities, which do not conform to one logic yet combine, many aspects of various logics.

For example, the role of parent would play an essential role in encouraging individuals to

obtain social welfare via the creation of new ventures and a higher level of stability in

finance. In method, all the measures used in this study are based on self-reported data

collected through a questionnaire. To minimize the potential effects of common method

variance, we used several procedural remedies, as indicated in the methodology section

(Podsakoff et al., 2003) and tested for common method bias using Harman’s one-factor

test. We found that common method variance is unlikely to be a serious problem in the

data. Furthermore, the present study is cross-sectional; the effects of identity

configuration on resourcefulness may require a time lapse to be fully assessed. Finally,

because it is a context with Chinese social entrepreneurs, new studies in other countries

and in different types of organizations could help to corroborate the results shown in this

research.

Conclusion

Though social enterprise has the potential to help address critical social and

environmental problems, they often have to offer both the economic and social solutions
 -121-

and simultaneously maintain a self-sufficient status. The goal of this research was to

understand how some factors might influence social entrepreneurs’ identity structure,

leading them to behave resourcefully. We used identity theory to help explain the nature

of these differences, and the approach we developed here can contribute to the

understanding of social enterprise creation and growth. Just as a majority of

entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs offer services with great value although they are just

starting to hold the recognition that they should have. In this way, it is essential to gain

the understanding of the nature of the developmental processes to ensure greater amount

of success for the organizations. Our identity-based model moves to explain an important

step in the process of creating social ventures.

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Chapter 4-STUDY THREE

TITLE: LOCAL INSTITUTIONAL ARRANGEMENT AND SOCIAL

ENTREPRENEURIAL RESOURCEFULNESS: SOCIAL INNOVATION UNDER
EMERGING ECONOMIES

ABSTRACT

Since social entrepreneurship thrives in resources-constrained environment, social

innovation may depend on the extent to which social entrepreneurs can make the best of

the accessible resources, no matter how limited, to come up with ingenious and plausible

methods when tackling social problems - “resourcefulness”. In addition, the environment

factors of social enterprises, such as institutions and the structural supports, may have a
 -129-

positive or negative effect on their operation successes. In this study, I present a model

that explores the regional institutional factors’ impact on the innovative endeavors of

social enterprises in China. It was found that SE could get legitimacy and resource for

innovation under better-developed subnational institution. I also examined the role of

social entrepreneur's resourcefulness on further bringing in legitimacy and resource for

innovation. Results show that regional institutional development enhances social

innovation, while the role of institutional development can be altered by entrepreneur's

engagement of resourceful behavior. These findings contribute to research regarding

determinants of social innovation under emerging market and provide new lenses to see

innovation from institution-based view and entrepreneur's active resources building.

1. INTRODUCTION

Social entrepreneurship (SE) has emerged as an important approach to social

problem solving (Robinson, Mair, & Hockerts, 2009; Short et al., 2009). The process of

social venture creation came to be interpreted as an instrumental mechanism not only for

supporting economic activities but more importantly transferring institutional

arrangement in areas deemed unprofitable by the private sectors and overlooked or

insufficiently served by the governmental policy (Dees, 1998; Desa, 2012; Mair & Marti,

2006). The core of the SE, therefore, is to creatively and innovatively integrate social

welfare and commercial aim in order to provide social value (Battilana & Lee, 2014;

Battilana, Sengul, Pache, & Model, 2014).

Indeed famous social innovations such as the Grameen Bank, created by Dr. M.

Yunus to empower disadvantaged through microfinance (Battilana & Dorado, 2010), or

 -130-

Ashoka, launched by Bill Drayton in the US in 1980 to build a international network of

social entrepreneurs, give hope to millions and represent models to refuse enacting

institutional limitations (Mair & Marti, 2006). In such way, social enterprise differs

fundamentally from pure commercial organizations because it prioritizes social impact

and social value as the primary goal while financial concerns comes secondary; it also

differs substantially from other non-profits which place a predominant reliance on donor

support to fulfill social welfare practices (Dacin et al., 2011). Though distinction remains

between social and commercial entrepreneurship (see Austin et al., 2006 for a review), a

growing body of work evidences that both social and commercial entrepreneurship

addresses similar conceptual questions about the discovery, evaluation, and exploitation

of opportunities and the set of individuals who engage in these actions (Shane &

Venkataraman, 2000). In addition, social enterprises like commercial ventures, offer

products and services to gain financial sustainability (Di Domenico et al., 2010). The

cross-fertilization of knowledge between social and commercial entrepreneurship blurs

the boundaries between social and economic value creation (Austin et al., 2006; Mair &

Marti, 2006).

Among the ways social entrepreneurs assess their impact is through meaningful

innovation (Choi & Majumdar, 2015; Mair & Marti, 2006). The extent to which social

enterprises are supported by local institutional arraignment may determine the

sustainability of any innovative endeavor, and, in turn, plays a critical role in their

cultivation of creativity.

These supports include financial and human resources that enable these firms to

identify plans and methods and to implement desired ideas and solutions to solve social
 -131-

problems. Thus, social entrepreneurs’ perceptions of the degree to which their

environment is favorable to the generation and evaluation of new ideas and opportunities

enabled by these support systems many impact their ways of formulating and assessing

novel chances and ideas. It is of great significance to study the impact of local

institutional support on operations of social enterprises, especially when there are limits

on their resources environments. However, current studies still focus on the implications

of commercial entrepreneurship and are predominantly carried out in developed countries,

leaving many research vacancies, particularly the strategies adopted by social enterprises

in terms of resource and legitimacy to adapt to dramatic institutional transformations

when expanding in new markets, so as to continue with the innovation endeavor. To date,

very few researchers have been dedicated to explaining the processes by which social

entrepreneurs mobilize resources to initiate, develop, and grow their enterprises. While

every economy is always in some sort of transition, a distinguishing feature of transition

economies is that they tend to have more "fundamental and comprehensive changes

introduced to the formal and informal rules of the game that affect firms as players",

which are labeled "institutional transitions" (Peng, Wang, & Jiang, 2008). As a result, the

concept of social innovation is perceived from a fresh angle within the framework of

these institutional transitions. It has been found that a variety of innovations of

enterprises can be understood through looking at the diverse elements in the environment

(Cajaiba-Santana, 2014; Newth & Woods, 2014). However, it is difficult to explore an

entire country as the institutional context due to the complexity and gigantic amount of

variations concerned, despite that it is extensively adopted in current research field (Chan,

Makino, & Isobe, 2010). In comparison, regional institutions are much closer to the
 -132-

social enterprises on the operational level, which can offer them immediate resources and

institutions with social connections in the locality. Therefore, the effects of local

environment on innovative activities of social enterprises can be studied from the

perspective of the regional institution instead of the national one. Premised on the

argument of institution-based view, this study aims at unraveling how the local

institutional context, province-level institution to be specific, may constitute a core

component in understanding emerging market SE's innovation. It is maintained in this

study that regional institutions, with its proximity to critical local resources, may play a

significant role in innovative activities of social enterprises. The institutional peculiarities

of different locations within a country affect the resources of that location to the venture.

Furthermore, very few studies have focused on the strategies of social enterprises in

pooling resources and seeking legitimacy within the local context. Due to the inherent

discrimination against private businesses in most new markets, social enterprises may

encounter many more problems in the changing institutional environments, such as the

absence of legitimacy (Low & Abrahamson, 1997) and external validation (Stone &

Brush, 1996). Compared with widespread allegations and stories that social entrepreneurs

make do with the resources they currently possess (Bornstein, 2007; Dees, 1998), very

few academic inquiries have been made into the contribution made by the environment to

impact social enterprises accomplishing innovations and providing services to the

vulnerable groups and individuals. It has been long held by the public that the individuals

are not powerful enough to mobilize institutions into actions, thus eliminating the

academic attention on such attempts (Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001). Nevertheless, as Rao

(1994) argued that entrepreneurs could become skilled users of cultural tool kits rather
 -133-

than cultural dopes, in order to be successful, entrepreneurs may take various actions to

seek legitimacy and resource to alter their unfavorable environmental condition. In other

words, entrepreneurs can be skilled institutional operators so as to display the potential

and strengths of their organizations in the way their future resource providers find

attractive (Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001). A primary mechanism employed in this process, I

propose, is the extent to which social entrepreneurs can apply and combine the resources

(both material and social) they have at hand to new problems- a behavior known as

“resourcefulness”. The concept of resourcefulness has been used to describe how

entrepreneurs, especially those who have fewer resource endowments, were able to

outmaneuver the established competitors (Baker & Nelson, 2005; Bradley, 2015; Ganz,

2000; Powell & Baker, 2011). However, the issue of resource constraints becomes even

more significant for social entrepreneurship because of both its internal tension to meet

both social and financial goals and its external plural and complex institutional

arrangements (Desa , 2012; Desa & Basu, 2013; Di Domenico et al., 2010). The notion of

‘bricolage’ (Baker & Nelson, 2005; Garud & Karnøe, 2003), which has been defined as

“making do by applying combinations of resources at hand to new problems and

opportunities (Baker & Nelson, 2005:333)”, has been validated as theoretically

appropriate and applicable to understanding of social venture creation (Desa, 2007; Desa

& Basu, 2013; Di Domenico et al., 2010; MacMaster, Archer, & Hirth, 2014; Zahra et al.,

2009). Social bricoleurs develop novel combinations of ideas, knowledge, and forms of

organizing to create the order of the materials at hand (Mair & Marti, 2009; Weick, 1993),

and such strategy has been argued as an instrumental mechanism for SE to respond to

unpredictable circumstances (Ciborra, 1996). Connections with other processes such as

 -134-

bootstrapping (Bhide, 1992), effectuation (Sarasvathy, 2001), improvisation (Baker et al.,

2003; Hmieleski et al., 2013) have also been discussed in the literature to specify the

boundary of bricolage (MacMaster et al., 2014). Admittedly, making do with limited

resources at hand (i.e., bricolage) and manipulating personal finances or operating on

business cash flow (i.e., bootstrapping) are important predictors of resourcefulness of

social entrepreneur, creatively acquiring and managing traditional (e.g., financial) and

non-traditional (e.g., stakeholder, persuasion) resources constitutes another dimension of

resourcefulness that are germane to social entrepreneurship (Di Domenico et al., 2010; Di

Domenico et al., 2009). In other words, a resourceful social entrepreneur is not only

capable of tinkering fallow resources, but also skillful of positioning and attracting

necessary resources for the growth of the firm. Thus, based on extant studies, I define

resourcefulness in the social entrepreneurship context as learned repertoires of creative

resource combination and acquisition. As such, resourcefulness may predict social

entrepreneurs’ attempts to bring social innovations to the marketplace to solve

meaningful problems and challenges. Also, these social entrepreneurs’ active making do

and seeking for legitimacy and resource can alter the impact of institutional environment.

As social entrepreneurs are engaged in the search to develop effective solutions to

the complex problems, they must generate new approaches that are both scalable and

sustainable-a meaningful social innovation. In here, a social innovation is not real unless

it deliberately addresses a social need (meeting social challenge), effectively induces

changes in social practices (initiating social change), and genuinely improves the well-

being of the beneficiaries and the society as a whole (creating social value). I draw on

prior studies (Cajaiba-Santana, 2014; Caulier-Grice et al., 2012; Howaldt & Schwarz,
 -135-

2010; Phills et al., 2008) to define social innovation as new configuration of social

practices (products, services, models, markets, processes, relationships etc.) that are

created from intentional and mission-oriented actor(s) at more effectively addressing

social needs and problems than is possible on the basis of established practices. To what

extent can social entrepreneurs endeavor to behave resourcefully to initiate solutions that

benefit their communities, thereby becoming social innovators? (Figure 5 presents the

theoretical model)

The present paper aims to contribute to this field of research through examining the

proposed hypotheses with data collected in China, the most influential new market in the

world. To begin with, through analyzing the supportive local institutions, the resourceful

actions of the social entrepreneurs and the contribution they make to the local market

using innovations, this study enriches social enterprise-based research literature

concerning innovations. It is highlighted in this study that, apart from national institutions,

regional ones also have an impact on the innovativeness of social enterprises. The more

developed institutional environment is, the more the resources and supports social

enterprises can get, and the better the strategies they can make in order to solve the

problems. For instance, the significance of the immediate environment is revealed

through the introduction of macro-micro linkage. Moreover, this study describes how

social entrepreneurs leverage environment to legitimate their SE by engaging in

resourcefulness, thus advantage subsequent resource acquisition and innovative activities.

Through exploitation of resources in constrained environments, social entrepreneurs are

able to engage in resourcefulness as a means to identify new and novel ways of resolving

social problems and meeting needs. The interaction of regional institutional development
 -136-

and entrepreneur's resourcefulness helps to understand how the SE embed and interact

with its environment to pursuit social innovation. Having realized the significance of the

local environment, social entrepreneurs are willing to adopt the tool of resourcefulness in

order to ease the confinements posed by the environment. Through taking resourceful

strategies, these social entrepreneurs are able to exert influences on the institutional

changes to have access to key resources.

Figure 5 Hypothesized Model of Social Innovation

2. LITERATURE REVIEW AND HYPOTHESES

Contrast to social enterprises in developed countries with developed institutional

environments; social ventures operating in transition markets have to put up with the

backward institutional contexts in the countries of origin. In addition, distinct local

institutions also pose a challenge. In new markets, there is a severe shortage of

institutions that can support the market in times of grave needs, which is in contrast to the

developed countries, where there are many supportive institutions (McMillan, 2007).

Thus the within-country unbalanced institutional developments provide us an opportunity

 -137-

to see how institutions matter for social innovation. Many emerging markets have a long

way to go until they can reach the final goal of the market economy because they almost

start from scratch. Prior studies have discussed the starkly unbalanced economic

development among different areas within a country (Allen, Qian, & Qian, 2005;

Jennings, Greenwood, Lounsbury, & Suddaby, 2013; Seelos et al., 2011). As a result, the

often-used country homogeneous argument of country institutions becomes inefficient in

its explaining power when it comes to the innovational activities of social enterprises

operating in transition markets. In contrast, the regional institutions can offer social

enterprises an environment with diversity such that it is virtually impossible to find two

regions in a single country where the institutions and resources are the same.

2.1 Local Institutional Support and Social Innovation

Institutional environments are characterized as complex and plural (Dunn & Jones,

2010; Greenwood et al., 2011; Powell & DiMaggio, 2012), with multiple aspects and

multiple levels (Batjargal et al., 2012; Scott, 1995). Such complexity might be

particularly salient in emerging economy where regional institutional development is

highly unequal and fragmented (Bruton, Ahlstrom, & Puky, 2009), with some regions

have an early start for the transition to market economy and have reformed economically

and institutionally faster than others (Xiaolu & Gang, 2004). As a result, each of the

subnational regions has its patterned institutional arrangements for legitimacy

requirements. Thus, the regional or local environment, as the most direct context that

provides firms with a resource environment, may offer us a new lens to view the role of
 -138-

environment or location to social innovation. I argue that a supportive local institutional

infrastructures and community culture are essential for the creation of new social value.

China, starting from the 1980s, has undergone drastic changes during the process of

advancing a more market-oriented economy, yet the accompanying social issues such as

income gap and environmental degradation call for a revised and more sophisticated role

of the “visible hands” of the government (i.e., governmental intervention) to creatively

solve social problems with social entities. The understanding of organization without

considering its wider social and cultural context is weak and incomplete (Scott, 1995).

For social enterprises, either for profit or nonprofit, under institutional upheaval, as the

one in China, the institutional development is particularly relevant because it draws

particular attention to how the broader social context defines what kinds of opportunities

and resources are available to them (Bruton, Ahlstrom, & Obloj, 2008).

For social enterprise to be innovative, a sufficient and effective social supporting

system is needed (Lan & Galaskiewicz, 2012; Yu & Zhang, 2009; Zhao, 2012). Although

China, especially in recent years, has implemented a series of supporting policies (e.g.,

direct funding, deregulation) for the transformation of the third sector and advancement

of social enterprise model for better social innovation, social entrepreneurs still maintain

that it’s sometimes difficult and laborious to benefit from these programs due to the

shortage of information transparency and effective intermediary mechanisms to bridge

the supporting systems and SEs in need (Man & Terence, 2011; Yu & Zhang, 2009). Yet,

variation exists in terms of to what extent the local institutional system emphasizes the

legitimacy for innovation and facilitates interpretation and connection among groups of

socially disadvantaged, policy maker, and social entrepreneurs. For example, social
 -139-

enterprises embedded in a subnational system of well-developed institutions have

routines and processes that provide an advantage in understanding and anticipating

innovative strategy. In other words, the strong and efficient local instituions lower the

information searching and aggregating cost needed for social innovation by reducing

information asymmetry and increasing transaction transparency. Therefore, I argue that

the stronger and more efficient institutions embody more legitimacy for more creative

and innovative initiatives and more emphasis on enhancing market collaboration in

allocating resources for innovative strategy.

Furthermore, the motivation and sustainability of innovation creation, transmission,

and relocation are greatly determined by the institutional infrastructure. For subnational

regions in China with better-developed institutional arrangements, government is

consciously avoiding excessive controlling over resource allocation and intervention,

rather, they have a higher sense of acting more as a “judge” or “facilitator” to help build

and maintain tangible and intangible infrastructures that business entities and non-state

sectors can utilize to get the legitimacy and resource for innovation by their own ability.

Notably, innovation intermediaries, deliberately built and facilitated by the government

and third sector, can help bring in resources from a larger network and encourage

collaboration between different actors (e.g., application of valuable academic research in

terms of technology or process to better advance social welfare through

commercialization) (Mueller et al., 2014). Thus, regions with effective innovation

intermediaries enable SE innovation by help transfer the innovation output and enhance

the innovative capacity of the sector and region.

 -140-

Last but not least, local cultures and norms of the general public also play a

significant role in determining social entrepreneur’s cognitive schema and perceptual

well being when trying to employ business thinking to social welfare initiative for better

innovation. In their work, Dodd and Hynes (2012) found that, in many of the less

developed areas (some of the more Southern and Eastern European nations ), there is a

lack of cultural support for entrepreneurship and in some cases the entrepreneurs will

have to face quite pronounced antipathy because local norms portrayed them as greedy

and exploitative and thus taking career as an entrepreneur is very unfavorable. Likewise,

some general Chinese culture values such as “being heartless because of becoming rich”,

“being related with business will dampen the original kindness of public welfare” etc., if

left unchecked and without a proper explanation, may also lead an image of heretic for

the social entrepreneur. On the contrary, local cultures and norms, which are favorable to

entrepreneurship and open in newness of social enterprise modeling will encourage and

spur the social innovation. Therefore, local cultures and norms, which are resistant to

entrepreneurship and conservative in newness of social enterprise modeling may

discourage or even stifle social innovation. Formally:

Hypothesis 1: Entrepreneurial supportiveness of local institutional

environment (i.e., formal infrastructures and informal social norms and culture) has

a positive relationship with the social innovation of social enterprise.

2.2 Resourcefulness and Social Innovation

Generally, resourcefulness has been used to describe how entrepreneurs, especially

those who have fewer resource endowments, were able to cope with limited handy
 -141-

resources and outmaneuver the established competitors (Baker & Nelson, 2005; Bradley,

2015; Ganz, 2000; Powell & Baker, 2011). However, the issue of resource constraints

becomes even more significant for social entrepreneurship because of both its internal

tension to meet both social and financial goals and its external plural and complex

institutional arrangements (Desa, 2012; Desa & Basu, 2013; Di Domenico et al., 2010).

Therefore, social entrepreneur has to do better than those in commercial ones in that they

are supposed to overcome the difficulty caused by insufficient resources and lack of

legitimacy with their acquired innovative capability.

As a core representative of resourcefulness, the notion of ‘bricolage’ (Baker &

Nelson, 2005; Garud & Karnøe, 2003), which has been defined as “making do by

applying combinations of resources at hand to new problems and opportunities (Baker &

Nelson, 2005:333)”, has been validated as theoretically appropriate and applicable to

understanding of social venture creation (Desa, 2007; Desa & Basu, 2013; Di Domenico

et al., 2010; MacMaster, Archer, & Hirth, 2014; Zahra et al., 2009). “Social bricoleurs”

develop novel combinations of ideas, knowledge, and forms of organizing to create order

of the materials at hand (Mair & Marti, 2009; Weick, 1993;Zahra et al. 2009), and such

responsive strategy has been argued as an instrumental mechanism for SE in

unpredictable circumstances (Ciborra, 1996). Admittedly, making do with limited

resources at hand (i.e., bricolage) and manipulating personal finances or operating on

business cash flow (i.e., bootstrapping) are key predicators of resourcefulness of social

entrepreneur, creatively acquiring and managing traditional (e.g., financial) and non-

traditional (e.g., stakeholder, persuasion) resources constitutes another dimension of

resourcefulness that are germane to social entrepreneurship (Di Domenico et al., 2010; Di
 -142-

Domenico, Tracey, & Haugh, 2009). In other words, a resourceful social entrepreneur is

not only capable of tinkering fallow resources, but also skillful of positioning and

attracting necessary resources for the growth of the firm.

Each environment has its unique store of resources, and social enterprises can have a

competitive edge through favorable understanding and utilization of the resources of a

particular region, implying that resourcefulness may be integral in the beginning when

innovations are required for coping with social change. This is because the resourceful

social entrepreneurs, who continue to create new solutions and perspectives for

examining different markets, have taken the interrelationship between social enterprise

and the environment into account. Resourcefulness is also connected to notions of

knowledge spillover, economic regeneration, and proximity designs, which refers to

regeneration through firm development utilizing the scarce but low cost, even cost-free,

local resources. Other characteristics of resourcefulness include information propagation,

economic regeneration and proximity designs, which refers to a type of regeneration by

way of enterprise growth while utilizing the scarce but low cost, even cost-free, local

resources. Desa (2012) pointed out that, for social enterprises operating in environments

where there is severe lack of resources, the notion of resourcefulness seems a sensible

and plausible approach to illustrate their development mode. To accomplish their tasks in

regions with limited resources, social entrepreneurs should be capable of creatively

soliciting unconventional resources as well as adapting them to the new solutions to

social problems. Moreover, social entrepreneurs are more likely to adopt the instrument

of resourcefulness when finding effective ways to solve those persistent problems that are
 -143-

possibly immune to conventional strategies. It is often the case that innovative

replacements are most sought for in the case of failure in traditional methods.

Previous work on certain dimension of resourcefulness (e.g., bricolage) suggests that

these behaviors may affect firm’s innovativeness (Ernst et al., 2015; Senyard et al., 2014).

Based on their theoretical track, I define resourcefulness as not being confined in making

do with whatever is handy (i.e., bricolage), but also include creating and making use of

social resourcing (i.e., community) to jointly make more out of limit or none. So, here I

set forth to examine the degree to which these behaviors may affect social entrepreneurs’

ability to develop social innovations for their communities and the general public. As

previously discussed, resourcefulness facilitates how social entrepreneurs use creative

approaches to recombine handy resources as well as attract possible resources, to spot

unserved market segments and offer products and services that solve the social issues and

serve the neglected social needs more effectively (e.g., cost-efficient and value

satisfactory). Formally, through the means of social enterprise, resourcefulness positively

drives social innovation.

Hypothesis 2: Social entrepreneur's resourcefulness has a positive relationship

with the social innovation of social enterprise.

2.3 Moderation of Resourcefulness on Institution-Innovation Relation

As previously discussed, regional or local institutional environments, serving as the

most immediate and direct concerns for the entrepreneurs, play the essential roles in

facilitating market transaction and communication and thus supporting firm’s innovative

activities (Meyer, Estrin, Bhaumik, & Peng, 2009). Specifically, the strong and efficient
 -144-

local institutions lower the information searching and aggregating cost needed for

innovation by reducing information asymmetries and increasing transparency. Given the

local institutional environments as the macro foundation for innovation initiatives, the

resourcefulness by the social entrepreneur can be regarded more as a strategic response,

rather than a necessity based adaptation, to combine external legitimacy requirement in

its local settings and internal legitimacy appeal of the SE (Desa & Basu, 2013).

The key benefits that resourcefulness brings to the social innovation of SE are the

creative reusing of otherwise neglected yet valuable resources through resourceful

activities and the involving of a symbolic role as an active innovator to stakeholders

through social resourcing and community engagement. Purposively developing

resourcefulness enables firms to reduce uncertainties, endure environmental fluctuations

and configure their own strategies and repertories (Desa & Basu, 2013; Di Domenico,

Haugh, & Tracey, 2010; Halme et al., 2012). For social enterprises with high

resourcefulness, the role of institutional strength and efficiency is more important

because resourcefulness can fulfill its value under more mature and supportive

institutions. In other words, given the same level of resourcefulness, a better regional

institutional arrangement will better facilitate social ventures’ innovative activities. The

combination of high resourcefulness and high supportive institutions would benefit social

innovation at most. In contrast, for social ventures with less mental set and skill set of

resourcefulness, the local institutional arrangements play a less important role and that

the difference of high and low supportiveness of institution will become narrowed and

not significant.
 -145-

Hypothesis 3: The positive role of local supportive institutional environment on

social innovation will be strengthened by social entrepreneur's resourcefulness.

3.METHODOLOGY

3.1 Sample and Data Collection

First, I conducted survey to collect the firm level innovation data. Social welfare

enterprises, private non-enterprise units, cooperatives, and some companies that have

been registered in the business sector but engaged in public benefit activities are all

included in the sample range. To get access to the sample, I attended events and

conferences where I can meet social entrepreneurs in person in order to exchange our

views on the venturing process. After these candid conversations, many of the

entrepreneurs and major organizers agreed to join my research. Oftentimes, founders and

core members of these social enterprises coordinated with other social enterprises in their

region to help to implement the investigation. Secondly, I contacted several social

entrepreneurship network-building institutions in China to get access to nascent social

entrepreneurs, and all of them are agreed to grant me the contact information of the

nascent founders and provide help if necessary. (Institutes includes: Shanghai Social

Enterprise Research Center; Shanghai NPI public welfare organization platform;

Shenzhen Zheng Weining Charity Foundation; Beijing Nandu Foundation; China Social

Entrepreneurship and Social Venture Capital Summit Forum). Snowball sampling is

designed into the survey where research respondents are asked to refer or identify other

social entrepreneurs to participate. I further screened according to sample selection

criteria of the research to guarantee the representativeness of the social enterprise samples.
 -146-

In this sample, social entrepreneurs serve a number of sectors, including environment,

education, hunger, arts and culture, mental health, and social capital investing.

Finally, the database includes 499 cases located in 31 regions (i.e., 22 provinces, 4

province-level municipalities and 5 minority autonomous regions) from two channels

both the online and offline, and collecting period is from March to December 2017. For

the online part, I sent out 1170 emails containing the survey link, and 302 have started the

questionnaire (a response rate of 25.8%). After data cleaning, the valid cases from online

dropped to 111 (due to key information missing and inappropriate filling manners, an

effective response rate of 9.5%). For the offline part where we adopted face-to-face

interviews, we have 388 useable questionnaires and 33 invalid ones. Another two

colleagues from SERC ShangHai and two researchers from NPI (Chengdu) have also

helped to collect the survey data. Combining the two parts, the total validity response rate

comes to 31.3%. This broad range of variation in local institutional settings allows us to

investigate how Chinese social enterprises are influenced by institutional heterogeneity

across regions. Second, for regional/local institutional environment data, a new dataset is

available which is called "China entrepreneurship index," and is by far the best one for

studying regional institutional support on innovation activities in China.

In order to minimize the potential effects of common method variance, we took

several procedures. First, in our explorative stage, pre-test of the survey instrument is

conducted with 10 social entrepreneurs who are not included in our final sample. In doing

so, we debriefed question-by-question for possible ambiguous items to make sure our

question is conceptually clear in this Chinese context and thus to helps to prevent the
 -147-

respondents from developing their own idiosyncratic meanings for them. Second,

regarding the problem of social desirability and retrospective data, we made specific

statement in our questionnaire that there were no right or wrong answers and that their

responses were confidential. Additionally, we checked for common method bias using

Harman’s one- factor test. We use SPSS 22.0 to conduct a principal factor analysis of all

measurement items, showing the KMO measure is 0.81, and that the Chi-square for

Bartlett's test of sphericity is 2814.59 with a significant level at 0.000. Before rotation, 2

factors are extracted, and together accounted for 57.79 percent of the variance. Because

the first factor accounts for 38.89 percent of variance (less than half the variance

explained by the set of factors with eigenvalues greater than one), common method

variance is unlikely to be a serious problem in the data (Podsakoff and Organ, 1986).

Table 11 summarizes the details for the study sample of 499 social entrepreneurs.

Table 11 Descriptive Statistics – Study Three

Demographic characteristics *N = 499

Organizational Form Items Frequency Rate

Commercial Registration 182 36.5%

Civilian-Run Non-enterprise
211 42.3%
Registration

Social org Registration 95 19%

Other 11 2.2%

Industrial Sector Items Frequency Rate

Business Services 114 22.8%

Rural Development 59 11.8%

 -148-

Education 150 30.1%

Environment 29 5.8%

Social Services 147 29.5%

Gender Items Frequency Rate

Female 194 38.9%

Male 305 61.1%

Education Items Frequency Rate

Less than High School 5 1.0%

High School 22 4.4%

Some College Degree 98 19.6%

University Degree 271 54.3%

Advanced Degree 102 20.4%

Other 1 0.2%

Serial Entrepreneur Items Frequency Rate

Yes 113 22.6%

No 386 77.4%

Item Min. Max. Average SD

Size (Employee) 1 150 11 15.3

Age 22 80 36.1 8.8

Work Experience 1 40 13.4 9.2

3.3 Measures

Local institutional support

 -149-

Social entrepreneurial supportiveness of the local institutional environment (formal

structure and informal community norm) was measured by adapting the “China

entrepreneurship index”, which is jointly developed by Chinese Academy of Sciences

(Key Laboratory of Big Data Mining and Knowledge Management), and Administrative

Committee of Zhongguancun Haidian Science Park. The index was computed based on

data from registration reports from the administrations of industry and commerce,

massive social media data on reports of local entrepreneurial activities from large

Chinese social media companies, human capital data about higher education institutes

and intellectual labor distribution from Ministry of Industry and Information Technology,

and other data about new venture financing rates and other PE and Venture Capital

events. The index measured the quality of innovation-supporting institutions at the

regional level (province and municipality) and dynamically captures the

development progress of environmental supportiveness toward innovation and creation

status. This environmental index is an aggregate of five sub-dimensions, including public

opinion toward entrepreneurship and innovation, human capital structure

(higher education and labor pool), financial capital (venture capital), vitality

(newly registered companies related to technology and finance), wellbeing (number of

high tech companies and number of patents applied). This measure captures a total of 31

provinces across Mainland China, which well resonates with our argument on the

regional level analysis of the institutional environment. In operation, we took the average

of the province index for 12 months (October, 2016- October, 2017). Table 12 shows the

descriptive statistics for the Index.

 -150-

Table 12 Descriptive Statistics of Institutional Environment Index

Province (Rank) Institutional Frequency Rate

Support Index
1.Beijing 35 7.0%
731.17
2.Guangdong 67 13.4%
723
3.Shanghai 27 5.4%
710.92
4.Jiangsu 19 3.8%
669.42
5.Zhejiang 11 2.2%
658
6.Fujiang 14 2.8%
520.67
7.Sichuan 33 6.6%
514.67
8.Shandong 15 3.0%
488.08
9.Hubei 14 2.8%
480.92
10.Hunan 13 2.6%
443.92
11.Tianjin 13 2.6%
431.17
12.Anhui 15 3.0%
407.17
13.Shanxi 13 2.6%
396.83
14.Henan 10 2.0%
394.75
15.Liaoning 11 2.2%
384.75
16.Chongqing 16 3.2%
382.83
17.Hebei 11 2.2%
360.58
18.Jiangxi 13 2.6%
313.83
19.Jilin 10 2.0%
286.17
20.Shanxi 14 2.8%
261.17
21.Guangxi 11 2.2%
250.08
22.Heilongjiang 9 1.8%
238.42
23.Yunnan 11 2.2%
225.17
 -151-

24.Hainan 11 2.2%
201
25.Xinjiang 11 2.2%
194.83
26.Guizhou 12 2.4%
184.08
27.Gansu 11 2.2%
179.75
28.Neimenggu 11 2.2%
156.58
29.Ningxia 19 3.8%
152.33
30.Qinghai 14 2.8%
95.75
31.Tibet 5 1.0%
76.25
Note: n=499

Resourcefulness

Resourcefulness was considered in two ways – bricolage and community. Bricolage

borrows from the eight-items scale offered by Steffens et al. (2009). This is by far the

first scale created to measure the original definition of entrepreneurial bricolage by Baker

and Nelson (2005). Social entrepreneurs will be asked to indicate the degree to which, on

a five-point response scale (1 = ‘never'; 5 = ‘always'), they behave in doing things for the

social venture.

To capture the notion of creatively using and finding resources through building and

leveraging community networks (Starr & MacMillian, 1990; Brown & Duguid, 1991), I

develop a 4-item scale to measure the construct of community. Specifically, the items

created to measure the ties of social enterprise with local government agencies, social

networks, and communities. In total, eight items were used for the construct of

resourcefulness, and the Cronbach’s alpha reliability is 0.88. (Appendix A)

Social innovation
 -152-

In recalling my definition of social innovation as “new configuration of social

practices (products, services, models, markets, processes, relationships etc.) that are

created from intentional and mission-oriented actor(s) at more effectively addressing

social needs and problems than is possible on the basis of established practices", I draw

on the scale from Dahlqvist and Wiklund (2011), which measure the innovativeness of

the venture idea, to develop a new scale extended to the social enterprise context and

reflect the characteristics of the definition.

I keep three of their original scale items measuring novelty of an entrepreneurial

idea in terms of (1) product/service, (2) method of production, (3) method of promotion

and dropped the (4) target market/customers, because as our exploratory research shows

that the target group of SE focus on limited industry and domain (includes provision of

specialized social services (i.e., community service, psychological counseling, care of the

elderly, care of children of prisoners or children with cerebral palsy), poverty alleviation

and rural development, education and employment promotion.). Alternatively, SE’s

industry/domain will be used as control variable.

However, necessary change in item wording is made to reflect the social enterprise

context. Dahlqvist's (2011) original scale assess each of these dimensions by four

categories: 1) ideas are entirely new to the world or 2) ideas are new to the market or 3)

ideas substantially improved and or (4) imitative venture ideas. I keep their original

dimensions because they are theoretically consistent with my definition of social

innovation, and these three dimensions touch the base of "neglected social needs and

group beneficiaries" and the corresponding "product/service and process" to address the

needs of the targeting groups. However, what's lacking are the specific items that speak
 -153-

directly to the higher effectiveness of the new social venture business model in making

the social impact and creating more "social value " for the beneficiaries than the

"established practices." Therefore, for further adaptation, I added the fourth item as

"Does your new social venture initiative mean that you will use business model which are

(1.not novel; 2.substantially improved over existing alternatives; 3. entirely new to the

local targeting community 4. entirely new to the world) in attracting resources (e.g.,

social attention, funding and grants, volunteers, human capital, and etc.) compared to

what another social entity has currently used". Combining types and levels of

innovativeness, we arrived at an overall composite score for social innovation with a

theoretical range from 0-16. Cronbach’s alpha is 0.78. (Appendix A)

Control Variables

To account for potential confounding factors, a number of firm-specific variables

were controlled to apart their effects on social innovation. Firm size is found to be related

to firm innovation(Acs & Audretsch, 1987), and thus was controlled as measured by

number of employees. Sector of activity (business services, rural development, education,

environment, social services) and organizational form (Commercial registration, Non-

enterprise registration, social org registration, and other) are controlled due to their

potential influence on the depend variable. I also controlled entrepreneur characteristics,

including their age, gender, education, and entrepreneurial experience.

4. RESULTS

We used a linear hierarchical regression analysis with moderating effects to test the

hypotheses proposed. Table 13 shows the correlations between the major variables. Table
 -154-

14 shows the results of the regressions analyses. To rule out the possibility of any effect

derived from multicollinearity, we performed collinearity diagnostics, which indicated

that the variance inflation factors (VIF) of the variables did not exceed 2, eliminating thus

the possibility of multicollinearity.

Model 1 analyzes the influence of the control variables. They all explain with

statistical significance 5.8 percent of the variation in social innovation. Regarding the role

of control variables, we can observe that none of them is significant.

In model 2 we introduce the independent variables: institutional environment and

resourcefulness. As we can observe, the beta coefficient is positive and statistically

significant for the two variables, indicating a positive influence on social innovation and

confirming our hypothesis 1 and 2 regarding local institutional support and

resourcefulness. The incorporation of these variables improves the adjusted R Square by

0.266, significantly increasing the model’s total explained variance to 0.325.

Model 3 incorporates the interaction terms between institutional environment and

resourcefulness. We can observe that the coefficient corresponding to the interaction term

between IE and RE is positive and statistically significant. The total explained variance of

the model slightly increases by 0.007 and reaches 0.331. These results confirm our third

hypotheses.
 -155-

Table 13 Correlations Between Major Variables

Table 14 Results of the Regression for Social innovation

5. DISCUSSIONS AND CONCLUSION

 -156-

The goal of this research was to study the relationship between institutional

environment, resourcefulness, and social innovation. Though resource mobilization is a

fundamental concern facing any ventures, the pressure of resource constraints is more

significant for social ventures as they have socially driven missions wherein they need to

forsake potentially higher margins to pursue maximum social impact (Desa, 2012; Desa

& Basu, 2013; Di Domenico et al., 2010). Thus, social entrepreneurship provides a

relevant experimental setting in which to examine the role of resourcefulness, since social

entrepreneurs are forced to apply limited resources in creative and useful ways to solving

problems and creating new opportunities. Additionally, social ventures often operate in

environments that make it difficult to access quality resources at reasonable costs

especially in a transition economy context such as in China. However, there is limited

theory and empirical development on the approaches that social entrepreneurs can adopt

in mobilizing critical resources, and how such behavior will influence their innovation

output in terms of reducing and resolving social problems and challenges.

To deepen our understanding of the innovative initiatives of SE in emerging context,

we lowered the analytic level from national to subnational level and drew on the

institution-based perspective to examine the role of institutional development on social

innovation. Our findings indicate that while local institutional support is associated with

the degree of social innovation, the role of institution is not identical for different social

enterprise. We argue that social venture’s resourcefulness will change the influence

imposed by institution. Furthermore, findings also suggest that resourcefulness

implemented by the social entrepreneurs leads in novel approaches to attract and

distribute material and social resources, identify unserved market segments. Within their
 -157-

penurious environments and with limited and often sub-optimal choices, resourceful

behaviors (e.g., bricolage and community) become the key to encounter institutional

uncertainty to generate the types of needed solutions and innovations. Our results suggest

a complex, contingent perspective on social innovation by highlighting specific

conditions under which institutional theory and entrepreneurial bricolage theory may be

applied to social ventures.

Contribution and implication

This study makes several contributions. First, our focus on emerging market and the

empirical test in China with various subnational regions provide us a unique context in

which to extend existing theories of institution-based view as well as to connect

resourcefulness and innovation. Considering characteristics specific to this context, this

research contributes toward generating greater knowledge on how social entrepreneurs

benefit from the use of resourcefulness to survive and grow with limited available

resources. Specifically, our quantitative evidence shows that resourcefulness not only

directly influence the innovation of SE but also moderate the relationship between local

environment and social innovation. Such finding helps us to understand that, while

certain institutional conditions are likely to drive more innovation, the benefits of those

conditions can only be gained if the social entrepreneur is able to “make do” with the

resources at hand. This study, therefore, further highlights the importance of local

knowledge and resources (material, labor, and skills) and leads us to think that the

structural supports sustaining innovative activities are not sufficient to guarantee the

actual development of innovative initiatives and that social entrepreneurs’

resourcefulness becomes a necessary link in the chain of social innovation. It can be seen
 -158-

from the results that the policies, which are favorable towards innovation, like improving

the grant from government agencies, developing the network of venture capital, and

promoting availabilities of new technologies, will produce reluctant effects if the actions

upon social change are limited. The driving force of such changes depends on the

entrepreneurs as well as the strategies they tend to choose based on their current

resources.

Second, this research adds theoretical nuance to the resourcefulness construct by

identifying it as creative resource combination and social resourcing, a strategic choice

by the entrepreneur to active interfere with their environment for legitimacy building and

sense-making. Whether the role of regional factors or subnational institutional

development can be altered by social venture’s resourcefulness is an interesting question.

Indeed, the unpredictable environmental conditions that characterize the context of social

entrepreneurship show that, in case of great uncertainty, institutional and structural

supports do not suffice to guarantee social innovation. In our case, SE with high

resourcefulness will be more innovative under more developed institutional environment

since resourcefulness plays a better role in such environment. Moreover, this logic

reasoning may lead policy makers to focus on training programs, which promote

entrepreneurs to make do practices, might be a more reasonable decision than merely

arranging the government agencies and other supportive institutions. Our study shows

that the active role of entrepreneur, through resourcefulness, to alter their environment,

can be valuable in achieving firm innovation. Therefore, we argue that, in an emerging

context, such as in China, resourcefulness can help SE integrate ideas and skills of a

broader set of stakeholders, and may serve as a mechanism of strategic renewal.

 -159-

Further, our study also advances the knowledge of the empirical context of the

institutional research. As we argue that there exists subnational institution difference

instead of the country-harmonized measurement. Especially, this is not the only case for

China, many emerging economies and developed economies, like Brazil, India, US, and

Russia, have distinctive features in country regions, which tend to bring forth different

informal or even formal influence upon organizations’ behaviors and strategies. It can be

seen from our findings that subnational institutional development does not assure its

utility; social entrepreneurs can take the initiative to transform institutions in ways

favorable for them through a dynamic approach of resourcefulness. Over time, as local

institutions perceive social ventures as legitimate and worthy partners, social ventures

may obtain an enviable position where resource providers will be willing to invest or

donate quality resources at a fraction of market price (Desa & Basu, 2013). Our findings

give SE initiative to seek resources and legitimacy, rather than passive rely on the

environment. Such recursive duality of the structure (resource environment) and the agent

(social venture) implies that over time, the entrepreneurial action may bring forth a

transformative impact on institution environment. Resource mobilization becomes part of

the broader process of actor-initiated institutional change (Campbell, 2004) and acts as a

mechanism for social innovation.

Future research and limitations

Like any research, this one is not exempted of limitations. Findings should be

interpreted with caution and may lead to further investigation. First, our analysis of

subnational institution and resourcefulness is limited to the domain of innovation. The

more recognized outcome variables might be innovation performance or market

 -160-

performance, as the ultimate outcome of organizational innovative strategy. More future

studies should investigate the organization and institutional influence on other outcomes

as well as the performance implications of adapting the resource-mobilizing approaches

to a particular environment or specific organizational context to promote innovation for

the public interest.

Second, this study mainly focuses on the resourcefulness of entrepreneur as an

important capability of the firm. Resourceful behaviors may be developed into a more

strategic tool, though they are traditionally spawned from ad-hoc intuitive processes. For

social entrepreneurs, the development of such a tool can be used to evaluate the changes

of the amount of resources needed to provide the products and services that solve social

problems. In addition, via this application of knowledge, social entrepreneurs may also

learn entrepreneurial skills through doing and instigate entrepreneurial behaviors linked

with self-efficacy and build social firm capabilities in the venture creation and growth

process to push effective social change. Our study may limit in not including other

organizational assets, factors or dynamic capabilities. For example, it is noted from our

study that the social capital market is expanding to include not only traditional nonprofit

firms but also for-profit and hybrid entities that have strong social values and missions.

Such blurring of organizational structures among the different types of entities creates

opportunities in which non-profits are adopting and engaging in profit-seeking and

sustaining behaviors, and for-profits are eagerly seeking social value through forging

partnerships to reduce social problems and advance positive public outcomes (Austin et

al., 2006). A thorough understanding of how the social enterprise continually builds,

adapts, and reconfigures their internal and external resources to reach congruence with
 -161-

the changing social, economic, and institutional environments would provide further

insight into social impact modeling.

Another limitation lies in that our study is cross-sectional. However, the proposed

relationship and model indicate causal direction. Causal inferences originated from cross-

sectional modes are very limited. Future research will investigate many of these

relationships with reliable data to make a good foundation for the study of causality.

While the empirical sample in this article is designed to capture the wide variability

across ventures operating in the public interest, future research can extend the

examination to private commercial ventures and public corporations in larger sizes.

Conclusion

In this study, we examined how social ventures mobilize resources across a variety

of institutional environments and internal conditions. Incorporation of the concept of

entrepreneurial resourcefulness to the field provides a unique perspective in how social

entrepreneurs mobilize and utilize existing resources to accelerate innovations that

address some of the society’s most pressing problems. As such, they not only figure out

the innovative solutions but also utilize their relationships and knowledge to let the

stakeholders notice these innovations as well as the corresponding impact in driving long-

term and systematic changes. This study contributes to the entrepreneurship and social

innovation literature by offering an institution-based framework for ventures that

inherently need to balance social and financial missions—a key feature of social

entrepreneurship. Thus, it is crucial that we understand the nature of the development

process so that we can assure greater amounts of success for these organizations. Future
 -162-

studies can leverage these findings to develop organizational and institutional

environments conducive to social innovation and entrepreneurship.

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 -167-

Chapter 5- CONCLUSION

Social entrepreneurship, widely admitted as the vehicle for social innovation, is

lacking knowledge about the process of innovating for social value. In this dissertation, I

explore how social entrepreneurs manage to survive and contribute to social innovation

while maintaining mixed, oftentimes competing, logics, namely social welfare logic and

commercial logic. Previous studies suggested that successful social entrepreneurship

hinges on the embeddedness with the local institutional arrangements that enable or

impede the innovation process (Seelos, Mair, Battilana, & Dacin, 2011) . Moreover,

innovation to the social problem may also depend on how social entrepreneur sees her

place in the social environment as well as the places of others to recognize the social need

and expound upon it.

The first study aims to contribute to the literature of social innovations by putting

forward a theoretical framework through a review of trans-disciplinary literature. It is my

argument that the SE’s internal dynamics of managing conflict will lead to actors’

entrepreneurial behaviors, which ultimately determine their innovativeness of providing

social values. While current works have endeavored to understand how SE can resolve

such dual tensions through transcending (Battilana & Dorado, 2010) negotiating

(Battilana et al., 2014; Shepherd & Haynie, 2009) and selectively coupling (Pache &

Santos, 2010, 2013), this domain has much less knowledge about the process of

innovating (Mueller et al., 2014). By positioning social innovations to the social

entrepreneurship context, the framework is intended to consider exclusion and conflict as

internal aspects of the society, which need to be addressed on a constant and dynamic
 -168-

basis. It is important to understand how behavior can be influenced by social systems and

how social systems can be influenced by the agency. As my model implies, the agents

(social entrepreneurs) interact with social context reflexively and actively, changing and

being changed by it since they encourage social transformations via social innovations.

As for practical implication, an emphasis on various means and skills of thinking, instead

of common analytical skills, social players should develop repertoires aiming at

developing resourcefulness (e.g., creativity (Korsgaard , 2011), bricolage (Desa & Basu,

2013; Gundry et al., 2011)), and collaboration as a result of mobilizing resources and

other agents.

The second study investigates how do the social entrepreneur’s salient role and

personal identity, which concurrently straddle both business and social welfare logic,

affect their cognitive schema and behavior patterns in terms of being resourceful.

Providing a foundation to theorize about internal tensions within the SE, extant works

calls for entrepreneurship frameworks to be extended in ways that account for social

enterprise (Dacin et al. 2010; Shepherd 2015) through the integration of identity theory

(Dacin et al., 2011; Simms and Robinson, 2009). By doing so, this study tests a model of

social entrepreneurial identity configuration and resourcefulness for Chinese social

entrepreneurs. Results indicate social entrepreneur identity is composed of both the pro-

social and the business identities (both role and personal identity), and that the salience

and structuring of them lead to the variation of their resourcefulness. Resourcefulness

was highest when the social entrepreneur’ identity configuration holds a salient role

identity aligned with both social and business logics (i.e., balanced social entrepreneur).

However, the perception that the local institutional environments valued social businesses
 -169-

weakens the between-group difference, demonstrating that a higher level of key

stakeholders’ support to the SE’s hybridity nature play an important role in helping social

entrepreneur speed up the renegotiation process of dual identity conflict, create

discretion around response strategies testing the institutional barriers, and be more

assertive in defining new rule of game through resourcefulness.

The third study tries to uncover the relationship between institutional determinants,

resourcefulness, and the innovation strategy of SE in China. To deepen our understanding

of the innovative initiatives of SE in emerging context, we lowered the analytic level

from national to subnational level and drew on the institution-based perspective to

examine the role of institutional development on social innovation. Our findings indicate

that while local institutional support is associated with the degree of social innovation,

the role of institution is not identical for different social enterprise. We argue that social

venture’s resourcefulness will change the influence imposed by institution. Furthermore,

findings also suggest that resourcefulness implemented by the social entrepreneurs leads

in novel approaches to attract and distribute material and social resources, identify

unserved market segments. Within their penurious environments and with limited and

often sub-optimal choices, resourceful behaviors (e.g., bricolage and community) become

the key to encounter institutional uncertainty to generate the types of needed solutions

and innovations. Our results suggest a complex, contingent perspective on social

innovation by highlighting specific conditions under which institutional theory and

entrepreneurial bricolage theory may be applied to social ventures.

REFERENCES
 -170-

Battilana, J. & Dorado, S. 2010. Building sustainable hybrid organizations: The

case of commercial microfinance organizations. Academy of Management
Journal, 53(6): 1419-1440.
Battilana, J., Sengul, M., Pache, A.-c., & Model, J. 2014. Harnessing productive
tensions in hybrid organizations: The case of work integration social
enterprises. Academy of Management Journal: amj. 2013.0903.
Dacin, M. T., Dacin, P. A., & Tracey, P. 2011. Social entrepreneurship: A critique and
future directions. Organization Science, 22(5): 1203-1213.
Dacin, P. A., Dacin, M. T., & Matear, M. 2010. Social entrepreneurship: Why we don't
need a new theory and how we move forward from here. The academy of
management perspectives, 24(3): 37-57.
Desa, G. & Basu, S. 2013. Optimization or Bricolage? Overcoming Resource
Constraints in Global Social Entrepreneurship. Strategic Entrepreneurship
Journal, 7(1): 26-49.
Gundry, L. K., Kickul, J. R., Griffiths, M. D., & Bacq, S. C. 2011. Creating social change
out of nothing: The role of entrepreneurial bricolage in social entrepreneurs'
catalytic innovations. Social and Sustainable Entrepreneurship, 13: 1-24.
Korsgaard, S. 2011. Opportunity formation in social entrepreneurship. Journal of
Enterprising Communities: People and Places in the Global Economy, 5(4):
265-285.
Mueller, S., D’Intino, R. S., Walske, J., Ehrenhard, M. L., Newbert, S. L., Robinson, J.
A., & Senjem, J. C. 2014. What's Holding Back Social Entrepreneurship?
Removing the Impediments to Theoretical Advancement. Journal of social
entrepreneurship: 1-12.
Pache, A.-C. & Santos, F. 2010. When worlds collide: The internal dynamics of
organizational responses to conflicting institutional demands. Academy of
Management Review, 35(3): 455-476.
Pache, A.-C. & Santos, F. 2013. Inside the hybrid organization: Selective coupling as
a response to competing institutional logics. Academy of Management
Journal, 56(4): 972-1001.
Seelos, C., Mair, J., Battilana, J., & Dacin, M. T. 2011. The embeddedness of social
entrepreneurship: Understanding variation across local communities.
Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 33: 333-363.
Shepherd, D. & Haynie, J. M. 2009. Family business, identity conflict, and an
expedited entrepreneurial process: A process of resolving identity conflict.
Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 33(6): 1245-1264.
Simms, S. V. & Robinson, J. 2009. Activist or entrepreneur? An identity-based
model of social entrepreneurship. International perspectives on social
entrepreneurship: 9-26.
 -171-

APPENDICES
 -172-

APPENDIX A: Measurement Scales Overview

Items measuring Entrepreneurial Role Identity in the Entrepreneur Survey

(Cronbach’s alpha 0.93)

Original item Modified Item Source

Blood donation is I often think about being Callero, 1985

something I rarely even user -oriented

think about.

Blood donation is I often think about being Callero, 1985

something I rarely even competitor-oriented

think about.

Blood donation is I often think about being Callero, 1985

something I rarely even inter-functionally

think about. coordinated

I really don’t have any clear I do have a clear concept of Callero, 1985

feelings about blood myself as an entrepreneur

donation.

Blood donation is an To be an entrepreneur is an Callero, 1985

important part of who I am. important part of my

identity

Items measuring Prosocial Role Identity in the Entrepreneur Survey

 -173-

(Cronbach’s alpha 0.90)

Original item Modified Item Source

Blood donation is I often think about being Callero, 1985

socially oriented
something I rarely even

think about.

I would feel a loss if I were I believe I have a moral Callero, 1985

obligation to helping to
forced to give up donating meet the needs of others

blood.

I really don’t have any clear I do have a clear concept of Callero, 1985
myself as a prosocial person
feelings about blood

donation.

Blood donation is an To be a prosocial person is Callero, 1985

an important part of my
important part of who I am. identity

PSED items measuring Personal identity

Original item Capturing personal value (Hitlin, 2003)

Have financial security Used to measure the value of wealth

Gain a higher status Used to measure the value of power

Be free to adapt my approach to life Used to measure the value of autonomy

Get greater flexibility for personal life Used to measure the value of exciting life

Enhance the well-being of others Used to measure the value of benevolence

 -174-

Improve community and society Used to measure the value of Caring

Protect and Improve the environment Used to measure the value of environmental

protection

Correct social injustice, care for the Used to measure the value of social justice
weak

Items measuring Resourcefulness in the Entrepreneur Survey

(Cronbach’s alpha 0.88)

Original item Source

We use any existing resource that seems Senyard et al. 2014

useful to respond to a new problem or
opportunity.

We deal with new challenges by applying a Senyard et al. 2014

combination of our existing resources and
other resources inexpensively available to
us.

When dealing with new problems or Senyard et al. 2014

opportunities, we take action by assuming
that we will find a workable solution.

We combine resources to accomplish new Senyard et al. 2014

challenges that the resources weren’t
originally intended to accomplish.

We build and utilize local social networks to Self-created

help my business grow.

We strengthen ties with local communities Self-created

for the social assets accumulation through
the form of friendship, liking, gratitude, trust
and obligation.

We work and collaborate with Self-created

nongovernmental organizations (NGOs),
social enterprises or other locally influential
community members to co-opt legitimacy
 -175-

and underutilized resources.

We participate in social associations to Self-created

reduce the uncertainty of doing business and
increase access to critical resources.

PSED items measuring Perceived key stakeholders’ commitment

(Cronbach’s alpha 0.84)

Original PSED-Community norm scale Modified Item

item

State and local governments in your In your community, state and local
community provide good support for governments provide good support for those
those starting new businesses. starting new social enterprises.

Bankers and other investors in your In your community, influential organizations

community go out of their way to help or well- respected people (e.g., socially
new businesses get started. responsible firms, impact investors or wealthy
individuals) go out of their way to help new
social ventures get started.

Community groups provide good In your community, social groups such as

support for those starting new neighborhood committees and associations
businesses. provide good support for those starting new
social enterprises.

The social norms and culture of your In your community, creativity and
community encourage creativity and innovativeness though entrepreneurship have
innovativeness. often been reported in the public media.
The social norms and culture of the In your community, the social norms and
community where you live are highly culture are highly supportive of success
supportive of success achieved through achieved through one’s own personal efforts.
one’s own personal efforts.

Items measuring Social Innovation in the Entrepreneur Survey

(adapted from Dahlqvist and Wiklund, 2011). Cronbach’s alpha 0.78

 -176-

Does your new social venture initiative mean that you will offer a product or service,
which is [Multiple choices] compared to what other social entity has currently offered? –
(up to “not novel”, “substantially improved over existing alternatives”, “entirely new to
the local targeting community”, “entirely new to the world”)

Does your new social venture initiative mean that you will use methods of production or
processes, which are [Multiple choices] compared to what other social entity has
currently used? - (up to “not novel”, “substantially improved over existing alternatives”,
“entirely new to the local targeting community”, “entirely new to the world”)

Does your new social venture initiative mean that you will use promotion strategies or
marketing methods, which are [Multiple choices] compared to what other social entity
has currently used? - (up to “not novel”, “substantially improved over existing
alternatives”, “entirely new to the local targeting community”, “entirely new to the
world”)

Does your new social venture initiative mean that you will use business model, which are
[Multiple choices] in attracting resources (e.g., social attention, funding and grants,
volunteers, human capital, and etc.) compared to what other social entity has currently
used? - (up to “not novel”, “substantially improved over existing alternatives”, “entirely
new to the local targeting community”, “entirely new to the world”)

Items measuring Control Variables

Organizational What is the legal form of your business?

forms 1) Industry and Commerce Registration

2) Civilian-run Non-enterprise Unit Registration

3) Social Association Registration

4) Other

Industry Commercial service

Agriculture & rural development

Scientific research

Education

Health care
 -177-

Culture

Eco-environment

Social service

Legal service

Religion

Career development

International or foreign related

Other

Size of SE So far, how many full-time employees does the organization have?

Age Year of Birth?

Education The highest level of education completed:

Less than High School

High School

Some College/University No degree

College/University Degree

Advanced Degree (e.g., Masters, Ph.D, Doctorate, JD)

Other

Working Years of work experience?

Experience

Entrepreneurial Do you have any previous experience creating a new business?

experience [Yes/No]

If yes (years of entrepreneurial experience)

 -178-

APPENDIX B: Qualitative Phase - Measures & Interview Protocol

Interview Consent Form

I am Huangen Chen, a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Management and

Global Business at Rutgers University, and I am conducting interviews of social

entrepreneurs in order to understand how they became social entrepreneurs, what their

role and personal identity mean to them, and how these identities interact to enact or

constrain the resource mobilization in their initiatives.

During this study, you will be asked to answer some questions about your journey

towards entrepreneurship, and to identify the sources of influence that you encountered

on this journey. This interview was designed to be approximately thirty to forty-five

minutes in length. However, please feel free to expand on the topic or talk about related

ideas. Also, if there are any questions you would rather not answer or that you do not feel

comfortable answering, please say so, and we will stop the interview or move on to the

next question, whichever you prefer. Your participation is completely voluntary. If you

decide not to participate, it will not affect you in any way. Your participation is not

required by any service provider or funding source.

The research is confidential. Confidential means that the research records will

include some information about you and this information will be stored in such a manner

that some linkage between your identity and the response in the research exists. This

means that we will record some information about you, such as your responses to the

interview questions, which are audio-recorded. Please note that we will keep this

information confidential by limiting individuals’ access to the research data and keeping

it in a secure location. The members of the research team and the Institutional Review
 -179-

Board at Rutgers University are the only people that will be allowed to see the data,

except as may be required by law. During the process of collecting data, it is possible that

your name may disclose to members of the research team. Should a report of this research

be published or presented in conferences, the data will be presented in such a way that it

cannot be traced back to your name, by for instance reporting a group summary of

responses. All study data will be kept for three years after the completion of the project.

You are aware that your participation in this interview is voluntary. You

understand the intent and purpose of this research. If for any reason, at any time,

you wish to stop the interview or to skip any questions that you do not want to answer,

you may do so without having to give an explanation. You may decide not to

finish and to withdraw from participation at any time without penalty.

We anticipate that there will be minimal risk to you from your involvement in this

study. In particular, answering questions may be slightly tedious. There is also the

possibility that your name may be disclosed to the research team when collecting data.

You have been told that the benefits of taking part in this study may be renewed focus

from being reminded of self-meaningfulness and other expectation associated with being

a social entrepreneur.

You may also benefit indirectly from the findings of this research that promises to

be of use to entrepreneurs. However, you may receive no direct benefit from taking part

in this study.

The data gathered in this study are confidential with respect to your personal identity

unless you specify otherwise. You understand if you say anything that you believe at a

later point may be hurtful to you or damage your reputation, then you can ask the
 -180-

interviewer to rewind the tape and record over such information or ask that certain text be

removed from the transcripts. The interviewer will then ask you if you would like to

continue the interview.

The recording(s) will be used for analysis by the research team. The recording(s)

will include a code that is associated to your name. The recording(s) will be stored in a

locked cabinet and labeled with a code that links to your identity through a list that will

be kept in a separate locked cabinet. The recording(s) will be stored for three years.

If you have any questions about the study or study procedures, you may contact my

advisor or me:

My own contact information as the Principal Investigator is:

Huangen Chen

1 John F. Kennedy Blvd, Apt51A, Somerset, NJ, 08873

Tel: 973-420-4418

Email: [email protected]

Faculty Advisor:

Jeffrey Robinson

100 Rockafeller Road, Room 2131, Piscataway, NJ, 08855

Tel: 848-445-5643

Email: [email protected]

If you have any questions about your rights as a research participant, you

can contact the Institutional Review Board at Rutgers (which is a committee that
 -181-

reviews research studies in order to protect research participants). The IRB

Administrator at Rutgers can be reached at:

Institutional Review Board

Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey

Liberty Plaza / Suite 3200

335 George Street, 3rd Floor

New Brunswick, NJ 08901

Phone: 732-235-9806

Email: [email protected]

You will be offered a copy of this consent form that you may keep for your

own reference.

Once you have read the above form and, with the understanding that you

can withdraw at any time and for whatever reason, you need to let me know your

decision to participate in today's interview.

Your signature on this form grants the investigator named above permission to

record you as described above during participation in the above-referenced study. The

investigator will not use the recording(s) for any other reason than that/those stated in the

consent form without your written permission.

Subject (Print ) ________________________________________

Subject Signature _______________________________Date ______________________

 -182-

Principal Investigator Signature _____________________ Date __________________

Interview Protocol

I organized my interview questions in such a way that they allowed me to treat each

interviewee/informant as a case study; in this way, all cases were compared along the

same categories (Graebner, 2009; Eisenhardt & Graebner, 2007). The structure around

which I built each case essentially sought to fill four categories of information in each

interview and these categories were designed to tie back to the dissertation’s three

research questions.

The research questions are:

Research Question 1: What are the identity configurations in Social

Entrepreneurs (i.e., role identity and personal identity being variously align with social

welfare logic and commercial logic)?

Research Question 2: Does specific identity configuration of social entrepreneur

affect their patterned behavior of resource mobilization (e.g., bricolage and

community)?

Research Question 3: How does the perceived stakeholder commitment interfere

the relationship between identity configuration and resourcefulness?

The four categories of information that constitute the structure on which each case is

built are:

1. The informant’s identity configuration and tension

 -183-

2. Resourcefulness of the informant in dealing with challenges

3. The conditional effect of local institutional environments (perceived

social support)

4. Social innovation as the outcome of resourcefulness

Case Category 1 gives us the baseline of identity configuration and tension to refer

to in the research questions 1.

Case Category 2 on resourcefulness maps onto Research Question 2 on

resourcefulness of the social entrepreneur attributed to identity configuration.

Case Category 3 maps on to Research Question 3 on perceived social support.

Case Category 4 focus on the innovativeness of the SE, and aim to answer the “so

what?” question for this entire research by documenting impact and outcome of social

entrepreneur’s resourcefulness and identity configuration.

Introductory questions

1. Good morning Jane/Jack. Thank you so much for taking time off to meet me and

tell me about your entrepreneurial journey. As I mentioned to you earlier, I am a

doctoral student at Rutgers Business School. You were referred to me by the NPI that you

know so well since you attended their training and sponsorship programs. I am

conducting research on social entrepreneurs and trying to understand what makes them

take this path in life to be a social entrepreneur, and what makes them perceive such

identity in different ways, and how do they address resource scarcity. The information

that I gather through this research will be kept confidential, meaning that there will be no
 -184-

way for anyone outside the research team to trace your statements back to you. We

typically combine findings from several people and report them in the aggregate. If we

cite any individual statements in any publication, we will do so using pseudonyms and

not real names. Before reaching out to you, I went through a process of getting this

research approved by Rutgers’ Institutional Review Board. We typically ask the people

we interview to sign a consent form allowing us to audio record the interview. Again this

recording will be confidential and is just to make sure we correctly capture what you tell

us so as to make our research as accurate as possible. This recording will be stored for a

mandatory period of at least three years. So now, if you would be so kind…(hand over the

consent form for signing).

2. Could you briefly tell me about your line of business and your

organization?

3. Could you tell us about your background?

4. If you were to give me a snapshot of your venture’s history, what would

you say have been the milestones (or important events or stages) and when did they

occur?

Probes:

a) What lead you to become a social entrepreneur?

b) From where did the social needs/problems you set to resolve?

c) What stage are you in right now, as a social entrepreneur?

Further Probes:
 -185-

Have you registered the business yet?

Have you started the business yet?

How long has the business been in operation?

5. Is this the first business that you have started? If you started one earlier,

what became of it? What did you do prior to starting this SE?

Main questions

I now proceed to list the main questions in such a way that I start with open-ended

questions, and in some cases provide alternative ways of asking the question, just in case

the first way does not yield a useful answer. For some of the questions, I have provided

“probes” that I would only use if the open-ended questions seem vague to the informant,

or if I sense the informant is not really addressing the question. These probes help specify

the question and bring it nearer to the type of information that I would like to know. I

could also use the probes to elicit more information if the answer to the open-ended

question was insufficient, or if I saw the opportunity to go further down a

particular/specific line within the purview of that open-ended question.

1. Identity configuration and tension

1. What motivated you to start this business?

(Alternative: What prompted you to start your business?

What motivated your decision to start a business?

What are the motivators that led to your decision to start this business venture?)
 -186-

2. Why is your business so important to you? Please give examples to illustrate what

you mean.

(Alternatives: What purpose does the business venture serve for you personally,

what does the business venture mean to you? What is your SE’s goal? Please give

examples to illustrate what you mean.).

3. How do you think about your work, generally? What meaning or significance

does your business have for you in your life? Please give examples to illustrate what you

mean.

4. When you think about your business, what is it about it that is most important to

you? Please give examples to illustrate what you mean.

5. How does your prior work role(s) or other social role you adopt now affect your

decision to become a social entrepreneur? Please give examples to illustrate what you

mean.

6. How does the name “social entrepreneur” fit your identity? How does this

identity look like to you?

7. A lot of people say that combining social welfare and business discipline is

difficult. How would you comment? How strong you feel the tension? How would you

address it?

2. Resourcefulness of the informant in dealing with challenges

1. Could you describe the discovery and exploitation process, in other words, how

do you organize?
 -187-

2. What are the ways, activities, and processes, you use to deliver the value?

Probes:

What are the tools you use?

Are there unique properties about the technology you use in your SE?

3. What kinds of challenges do you face on a day-to-day basis?

Probes:

Have you found any challenges more difficult to overcome than others?

4. How do you acquire the resources or inputs you use in your products/services?

5. Do you purchase materials that you need or can you generally find what you need

here?

6. Have you found that some resources work better than others?

Probes:

Do you often combine resources that are seemingly irrelevant?

7. Do you often try different ways to solve challenges?

8. Do you often engage in the community activities? Or your deliberately build and

maintain the social networks with key actors.

9. Do you sometimes stretch the rules or norms of society selectively in bringing

your new product or service? If so, how?

3. The conditional effect of local institutional environments

1. How does the local institutional arrangement impact your venturing process?
 -188-

Probes:

Other general environmental factors that you think are important for your venture

creation?

In what way you would hope the governmental sector and private sector to get

involved and help social entrepreneurship?

2. What kind of role do the key external stakeholders play in supporting or

constraining the venturing process?

Probes:

Key stakeholders such as local government, financiers, community groups and etc.

4. Social innovation as the outcome

1. How close is your current business idea to the original idea that moved you to

become an entrepreneur?

2. What impact would you like your business to have?

Probes: on society/ on others/ on people/ on the environment

3. What makes your venture unique? Why do you think your product or service is a

better choice?

Probes:

What about your targeting group, are your targeting a unique group of people?

4. How did you initially market the new product or service? Any unique

improvement?

5. Before we conclude, is there anything else that you would like to share?
 -189-

Concluding script

Jane/Jack, I’d like to thank you for having taken so much of your time to answer all

my questions. You have given me a lot of food for thought, and I will now have to analyze

these answers and learn as much as I can from them. I may in the process need to contact

you if I need any clarification, and just to make sure I understood you right, but I hope that

will not be necessary. Should you wish to contact me, here’s my business card with all my

contact information, and in any case, we have already emailed each other a couple of

times. Once more, thank you very much, and I wish you all the very best in your business.
 -190-

APPENDIX C: Quantitative Phase – Social Entrepreneurs Survey

Survey Consent Form

You are invited to participate in a research study conducted by Huangen Chen, a

Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Management and Global Business at Rutgers

University. I am conducting a survey of social entrepreneurs in order to understand what

their identities mean to them, and how their identity characteristics influence their

responses in dealing with resource mobilization, and the final impact on innovation.

Approximately 200 subjects will participate in this survey, which should last

between 15 and 20 minutes. You will be requested to read and agree to this consent form

and then to answer a single online survey of about 30 questions.

This research is confidential. Confidential means that although research records will

include some information about you, this information will be stored securely in such a

manner that access to this research data will be limited to the members of the research

team and the Institutional Review Board at Rutgers University, except as may be required

by law. Should a report of this research be published or presented in a conference, the

data will be presented in such a way that it cannot be traced back to your name, by for

instance reporting a group summary of responses. All study data will be kept for three

years after the completion of the project.

There are no foreseeable risks to participation in this study. You are aware that your

participation in this survey is completely voluntary. As such, if you are uncomfortable

answering any of the questions, you may exit the survey. Your decision not to participate

will not affect you in any way.

 -191-

Potential benefits of completing this survey include automatic entry into a raffle

where the winner gets a ¥ 1000 Taobao gift card when the survey closes and is informed

by email. You may get renewed focus from being reminded of the self-meaningfulness

associated with being a social entrepreneur. You may also benefit indirectly in future

from the findings of this research. However, it is possible that you may receive no direct

benefit from taking part in this study. The survey data will be used for analysis by the

research team. The data will be kept securely in the online cloud storage (icloud by Apple

company) by using password that is only known to the investigator. The data will be kept

for three years after the completion of the research.

If you have any questions about the study or study procedures, you may contact me

or my advisor:

My own contact information as the Principal Investigator is:

Huangen Chen

U.S. address: 1 John F. Kennedy Blvd, Apt51A, Somerset, NJ, 08873

China address: Shuanghu Rd, A2-2-10-1, Yubei, ChongQing, 401120

Tel: +1973-420-4418 (U.S.) or +86139-083-69911 (China)

Email: [email protected]

Faculty Advisor:

Jeffrey Robinson

100 Rockafeller Road, Room 2131, Piscataway, NJ, 08855

Tel: +1848-445-5643

Email: [email protected]
 -192-

If you have any questions about your rights as a research subject, please contact an

IRB Administrator at the Rutgers University, Arts and Sciences IRB:

Institutional Review Board

Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey

Liberty Plaza / Suite 3200

335 George Street, 3rd Floor

New Brunswick, NJ 08901

Phone: +1732-235-9806

Email: [email protected]

Please retain a copy of this form for your records.

Sign below if you agree to participate in this research study:

Subject (Print) ________________________________________

Subject Signature ________________________ Date ______________________

Principal Investigator Signature __________________ Date __________________

 -193-

Online Survey

1. Study of New Social Entrepreneurs

* 1. You are invited to participate in a research study conducted by Huangen Chen, a Doctoral Candidate in
the Department of Management and Global Business at Rutgers University. I am conducting a survey of
social entrepreneurs in order to understand what their identity means to them, and how their identity
characteristics influence their responses in dealing with resources, and the final impact on innovation.

This research is confidential. Confidential means that although the research records will include some
information about you, this information will be stored securely in such a manner that codes are used to
establish some linkage between your identity and your responses in this survey. Furthermore, access to
this research data will be limited to the members of the research team and the Institutional Review Board at
Rutgers University, except as may be required by law. Should a report of this research be published or
presented in a conference, the data will be presented in such a way that it cannot be traced back to your
name, by for instance reporting a group summary of responses. All study data will be kept for three years
after the completion of the project.

There are no foreseeable risks to participation in this study. You are aware that your participation in this
survey is completely voluntary. As such, if you are uncomfortable answering any of the questions, you may
exit the survey. Your decision not to participate will not affect you in any way.

You may get renewed focus from being reminded of the self meaningfulness associated with being an
social entrepreneur. You may also benefit indirectly in future from the findings of this research. However, it
is possible that you may receive no direct benefit from taking part in this study.

If you have any questions about the study or study procedures, you may contact me:

Huangen Chen
Rutgers Business School (Department of Management and Global Business)
1 Washington Park, Newark, NJ, 07102
(973)4204418 or [email protected]

If you do not receive a prompt response from me, you can contact my advisor Professor Jeffrey Robinson:

Dr. Jeffrey Robinson

The Center for Urban Entrepreneurship & Economic Development
Rutgers Business School
94 Rockefeller Road, Piscataway, New Jersey 08854
(848) 4455643 or [email protected]

If you have any questions about your rights as a research subject, please contact an IRB Administrator at
the Rutgers University, Arts and Sciences IRB:

Institutional Review Board

Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey
 -194-

Liberty Plaza/Suite 3200

335 George Street, 3rd Floor
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
Phone: 732-235-9806
Email: [email protected]

Please print this page for your records.

By clicking continue below and going on to the next screen, you are providing your consent to participating
in this research study.

Continue

Do not continue
 -195-

Welcome

2. Welcome to the survey. In this survey we will ask you questions about how you perceive your identity as
a social entrepreneur and how you deal with resource constraint.

In order to give you credit for completing the survey, please enter the following:

Your name

Your organization

Your Occupation

Your preferred email

address

Your contact information

(telephone/QQ/Wechat)
 -196-

I am working on a business right now...

3. Are you in the process of setting up a business, social enterprise or organization?

Yes

No

4. Have you legally registered this business?

Yes

No

5. If yes, what is the legal form of your business? If no, which form you intend to register?

Industry and Commerce Registration

Civilian-run Non-enterprise Unit Registration

Social Association Registration

Other (please specify)

6. If no, which legal form you intend to register?

Industry and Commerce Registration

Civilian-run Non-enterprise Unit Registration

Social Association Registration

Other (please specify)

 -197-

7. Industry

Commercial service

Agriculture & rural development

Scientific research

Education

Health care

Culture

Eco-environment

Social service

Legal service

Religion

Career development

International or foreign related

Other (please specify)

8. So far, how many full-time employees does the organization have?

9. From the list below of types of income or revenue sources, pick the ones you consider your business
relies on for its income by dragging and dropping them into the adjacent box. Once you have the items that
are applicable to your business in the box, please rank them by placing the highest income source at the
top.

Sales (of products)

Contracts ( for services offered)

Grants (Government)

Grants (Foundations)

Donations

Others (e.g., Memberships/Subscriptions;Advertising;Renting/Leasing)

 -198-

10. Just before you decided to start this business, to what extent did you consider yourself to be already
financially stable, i.e. able to meet your ordinary personal and family obligations?

Very limited extent

Limited extent

Moderate extent

Considerable extent

Great extent
 -199-

Participant questions-role identity

11. Do you now or have ever worked in one of the following roles? (skip the question if not applicable)

Financial staff (e.g.,Accountant)

Business management (e.g., manager, director)

Business consulting (e.g., Corporate lawyer, consultant)

Investor (e.g., Business angels, venture capitalist)

Serial or experienced entrepreneur

Other (please specify other business related work role(s) that is important for the venture creation)
 -200-

12. To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statement?
(1. strongly disagree, 3. somewhat agree, 5. strongly agree)

strongly disagree neither strongly agree

I often think about being

user oriented (e.g,
paying close attention
on user preference and
satisfaction; aiming to
increase user value by
having better
understanding of
their needs)

I often think about being

competitor oriented (e.g,
regularly discuss
competitors strength
and weaknesses;
respond promptly to
competitive actions;
refine continuously the
competitive advantage)

I often think about being

inter-functionally
coordinated
(e.g, conciously
integrate each business
functions to better serve
the market through
effective communication
and resource sharing
among units)

I do have a clear
concept of myself as an
entrepreneur

To be an entrepreneur is
an important part of my
identity

The role provides me

important knowledge,
competencies and social
relations to start the new
venture
 -201-

13. Do you now or have ever worked in one of the following roles? (skip the question if not applicable)

Social worker

Volunteer for social purpose

Education Worker （e.g., teacher）

Social activist

NGO worker

Community organizer

Other (please specify other business related work role(s) that is important for the venture creation)

14. To what extent do you agree or disagree the following statement?

(1. strongly disagree, 3. somewhat agree, 5. strongly agree)

strongly disagree neither strongly agree

I often think about being

socially oriented (e.g,
advancing specific
social objective )

I do have a clear
concept of myself as a
prosocial person (e.g,
voluntarily behave in a
way to benefit other
people or society as a
whole)

I believe I have a moral

obligation to helping to
meet the needs of others

To be an prosocial
person is an important
part of my identity

The role provides me

important knowledge,
competencies and social
relations to start the new
venture
 -202-

Participant questions-personal identity

15. What are the one or two main goals that guide your life and business?

Have financial security

Gain a higher status

Get greater flexibility for personal life

Be free to adapt my approach to life

Enhance the well-being of others

Improve community and society

Protect and Improve the environment

Correct social injustice, care for the weak

16. Here is the same list you just saw, but this time we would like you to rate each item on its own. How
important to you are the following reasons in establishing the business?
Not at all Low Slightly Moderately Very Extremely
important importance important Neutral important important important

Have financial security

Gain a higher status

Get greater flexibility

for personal life

Be free to adapt
my approach to life

Enhance the well-

being of others

Improve community
and society

Protect and Improve

the environment

Correct social
injustice, care for the
weak
 -203-

Social innovation

17. Does your new social venture initiative mean that you will offer aproduct or service which is
compared to what other social entity has currently offered?

not novel

substantially improved over existing alternatives （less costly and more valuable）

entirely new to the local targeting community

entirely new to the world

18. Does your new social venture initiative mean that you will use methods of production or processes
which are compared to what other social entity has currently used?

not novel

substantially improved over existing alternatives

entirely new to the local community

entirely new to the world

19. Does your new social venture initiative mean that you will usepromotion strategies or marketing
methods which are compared to what other social entity has currently used?

not novel

substantially improved over existing alternatives

entirely new to the local targeting community

entirely new to the world

20. Does your new social venture initiative mean that you will use business model which are in
attracting resources (e.g., social attention, funding and grants, volunteers, human capital, and etc.)
compared to what other social entity has currently used?

not novel

substantially improved over existing alternatives

entirely new to the local targeting community

entirely new to the world

 -204-

Social Impact

21. From the list below of types of social and environmental impact, pick the ones you consider your
business has an impact in by dragging and dropping them into the adjacent box. Once you have the items
that are applicable to your business in the box, please rank them by placing the best performing item at the
top.

Educational Outcomes

Creation of Jobs

Health Outcomes

Community Development

Reduction in Recidivism

Waste Reduction

Environmental Outcomes

Lifestyle Impacts

Quality of Life Impacts

22. Comparing your business last year to how it was a year after it started, how much do you think your
social/environmental impact has grown?
It has declined Not at all Not much Little Somewhat Much A great deal
 -205-

Resourcefulness

23. How does the following statements represent how you never, rarely, sometimes, often, or always go
about doing things for your start-up?

never rarely sometimes often always

We use any existing

resource that seems
useful to responding to a
new problem or
opportunity.

We deal with new

challenges by applying a
combination of our
existing resources and
other resources
inexpensively available
to us.

When dealing with new

problems or
opportunities we take
action by assuming that
we will find a workable
solution.

We combine resources
to accomplish new
challenges that the
resources weren’t
originally intended to
accomplish.

We build and utilize local

social networks to help
my business grow.

We strengthen ties with

local communities for the
social assets
accumulation through
the form
of friendship,liking,
gratitude, trustand
obligation.

We work and
collaborate with
nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs),
social enterprises or
other locally influential
community members to
co-opt legitimacy and
underutilized resources.
 -206-

never rarely sometimes often always

We participate in social
associations to reduce
the uncertainty of doing
business and increase
access to critical
resources.
 -207-

Perceived key stakeholder commitment

24. Now we would like to talk to you about the community in which you now live. Please tell me how much
do you agree or disagree with the following statements? (1.strongly disagree, 2.disagree, 3.neither,
4.agree, 5.strongly agree)

strongly disagree disagree neither agree strongly agree

In your community,state
and local governments
provide good support for
those starting new social
enterprises.

In your
community,influential
organizations or well-
respected people (e.g.
socially responsible
firms, impact investors
or wealthy individuals)
go out of their way to
help new social ventures
get started.

In your community,
creativity and
innovativeness though
entrepreneurship have
often been reported in
the public media.

In your community, the

social norms and culture
are highly supportive of
success achieved
through one’s own
personal efforts.
 -208-

Demographics

You are now in the final section of the survey! We appreciate your having come this far. Here are
the last few questions. The following asks about your background information. Please check the
boxes that describe you.

25. Gender

Male

Female

26. Year of Birth

27. Highest level of education completed

Less than High School

High School

Some College/University No degree

College/University Degree

Advanced Degree (e.g., Masters, PhD, Doctorate, JD)

Other (please specify)

28. Years of work experience

29. Do you have any previous experience creating a new business?

Yes

No

If yes (years of entrepreneurial experience)

 -209-

30. Thank you for having been so generous with your time in taking this survey. Our final request is for you
to nominate one to three social entrepreneurs that you know and might be interested in taking this survey
to join the research and share their opinions.

We will write to your nominees directly inviting them to participate in the survey. None of what you have
told us will be shared with your nominees, and similarly, their own responses will be aggregated, kept
confidential.

Now please type the names and email addresses of one to three entrepreneurs you have nominated.

Nominee
1(Name/Email/Wechat)

Nominee
2(Name/Email/Wechat)

Nominee
3(Name/Email/Wechat)

31. We appreciate the time you spent in taking our survey. The survey is complete, and you may now close
this window.

End the survey

 -210-

Appendix D- Cases of Social Entrepreneur

Identity
Case Interviewee Social Enterprise and description
Configuration
Founded at: 2015, Shanghai Aroma Mind Care
Center
Location: Shanghai
Social problem aimed to solve: Certain groups
are under great social and emotional pressure,
which may cause unpredictable bad results. The
groups include (but not limited to) doctors and
staff in hospital, young people under high work
pressure, the neglected elderly
and disadvantaged groups.
Solution (Product/Service): We use an
innovative therapy that is a combination
of hypnosis, guided mediation, music treatment,
1 Founder/ Balanced
and aromatherapy, to alleviate the stressful mind
Female
and body. Hopefully, they can build up a therapy
system that can provide tailored service to
individual and institutions accordingly.
Phase and trend: Nascent Stage, but progress
well, has recently sign a contract with a
Shanghai local hospital to provide stress
alleviation service to staff.
Little background of the interviewee: Ms. Wu
had a working experience in a Fortune 500
financial company, and was taking charge in the
marketing department as a project manager.
She’s also a mother of 5-year-old boy.
Founded at: 2014, Chengdu Lohas
Sustainability Technology LLC.
Location: Chengdu
Social problem aimed to solve: If use common
disposable sanitary napkins, a normal women
Co-
probably use an average of 13000 or so in her
Founder/ Mixed
2 whole life. There exist two important social
CEO/ Commercial
problems. Most women only know the
Female
convenience of disposable sanitary napkin, but
don't have any idea of the harm that disposable
sanitary napkin can bring to the human body and
the environment. On one hand, cancer-causing
chemical substances such as
 -211-

formaldehyde, fluorescent agent are commonly

used in disposable sanitary napkins, which can
do a great harm for women's health in the long
run. Second, the material of most of the
disposable sanitary napkin is very difficult
to degrade in the natural environment (a normal
degradation time would be 500 years), and if
burned, will produce great air harmful
substances polluting the air. China alone has
nearly 700 million women; annual produce
sanitary napkin waste is an astronomical
figure. In addition to the degradation process of
the environmental harm, another huge
environmental damage is that in the production
of traditional sanitary napkin, the use of ordinary
cotton, the kind of a common economic crop,
though it accounts for only 2.5% of the global
crop planting area, it consumes 10% of global
fertilizer and 25% of the world pesticide. In plain
language, the land that planting common cotton
is under greater chemical damage. And in the
long run, this kind of destruction is irreversible.

Solution (Product/Service): 1. We provide

with environmentally conscious women
the organic cotton sanitary napkin;
2. We promote and support the organic cotton
planting of cotton farmers in rural areas, and at
the meantime, we provide with vulnerable
groups, especially the disabled youth the job
opportunities.

Phase and trend: Nascent Stage, but growing

very well, has recently received an investment
from an angel investor, the company has a
customer base that is very loyal and growing
strongly.

Little background of the interviewee: Ms. Xie

start this business right after her graduation from
the JiLing agriculture university. She has
attended a lot of camps and workshops that teach
organic and sustainable plantings. And she is a
loyal fan of Lohas (Lifestyles of Health and
Sustainability).
3 Balanced Founded at: 2016, Qi Neng Public Safety
 -212-

Founder/ Service Inc. Shun De. District. FoShan, Guang

Male Dong Province
Location: Shun De District, Fo Shan, Guang
Dong
Social problem aimed to solve: the
public safety education is greatly neglected in
China, though it’s becoming increasingly
important in people’s mind. Public safety,
including disaster, accident calamity, public
hygiene event and welfare event. Due to the
diversified development of modern
society, situations that endanger human existence
also appear to be more unpredictable and
complicated. For example, According to the
figure released in 2015 by the ministry of health
in China, 57000 people drowned, that’s more
than 150, people a day on average. Drowning is
higher than the proportion of the traffic accident
casualties, high-risk groups is 6 to 16 years old
children and adolescents. But to our deepest
sadness, in most cases, people die just because of
the lack of common sense and basic self save
skills. In China, there is a huge gap in the public
safety education, which means there are very
limited social services to address this critical
point. The existing educational model is
too superficial and often just goes though the
motions.

Solution (Product/Service): the founder has

a 32 year working experience and network
resources in the Chinese police department, and
wish to use his knowledge in the domain to
create a education model of drill that is
more issue-targeted, contextual,
and operational. In the event of a major accident
or dangerous situations, the public first need to
keep calm, and then have mastered a certain
amount of aid method, however this is easier
said than done. Such kind of psychological
quality and ability must be formed through
emergency drills, rather than only learning
theoretical knowledge of safety without real
practice. In a nutshell, the real safety knowledge
must be experiential.
 -213-

Phase and trend: Nascent Stage, but grow well,

has recently sign the contract with Foxcom,
Panasonic and other institute such as school and
community groups to provide safety education
and emergency drills design.

Little background of the interviewee: For the

past 32 years, Mr. Wang used to work as a police
chief, network monitor, chief commander of 110-
command center, and accumulating abundant
knowledge in public safety and network
resources in government and public institutes.
Founded at: 2014, Fujian Zinong Technology
LLC.
Location: Fuzhou, Fujian
Social problem aimed to solve:
Living in the concrete jungle, children lose the
chance to get to know the countryside life,
a lifestyle that is close to nature and more pure
human relations. On the other hand, rich cultures
and heritages from those villages are about to
disappear due to the lack of social recognition
and bigger gap between the mainstream culture.
This social problem, the village's
sustainability, is becoming increasingly
significant, as more and more young people
leave their village to go the urban cities for jobs
and opportunity.
Founder/
4 Mixed Social
CEO/ Solution (Product/Service):
Male 1.A O2O (online to offline) platform:
using ancient and old village as the foothold, we
targeting on the family tour and outdoor
education market. This platform combines the
online communication and the offline real village
tour experience in order to have better
education result. Our Brand, Zinong Study Tour
is now one of the best brands in its kind of
business.
2.Customized tour: according to customers'
needs, their tour package can be easily tailored to
whatever works for them the best.
3.Study tour content provider and designer: the
team has a deep knowledge and experience
of ancient village culture and conditions, and has
organized study tours successfully in the past 3
 -214-

years. We can export our knowledge and model

to those who are also willing to go back to the
village and revitalized the culture by bringing
family and children back to the village.

Phase and trend: Nascent Stage, but progress

well, received 1.2 million RMB seed money
using the crowd funding method in May 2014.
Now have study tours in Yunan, Zhejiang, and
mostly in FuJian.

Little background of the interviewee: Mr. Zhang

had a social working experience in a
philanthropy foundation as a project manager for
7 years, involving in a lot of village rebuilding
projects. When Mr. Zhang was in college, he’s a
student leader.
Founded at: 2015, Shenzhen Xihaner Caring
Center.
Location: Shenzhen
Social problem aimed to solve: Xi-han-er
(happy goofy kids) is a kind nickname generally
referred to those people (especially kids) with
mental disorders, including autism, down
syndrome, mental retardation, cerebral palsy, and
etc. When those kids grow up as adults, their
integration with the social world has been a
longstanding social problem. The family suffers
a lot financially and emotionally. In China,
the population of mentally disordered people has
Founder/ reached 12 million, however their employment
5 CEO/ Balanced rate is still lower than 5%, among all the
Male disadvantaged groups, mentally disordered
people has the worst job employment. Their
unemployment and the unimaginable heavy
financial and emotional burden for the family is
a major social issue in China.

Solution (Product/Service): The caring center

consists of a carwash shop, an indoor farm, and
the rehabilitation room. Mentally disable people
not only get paid by washing the cars (wages are
indiscriminate, they get paid as healthy people),
but also get trained physically and mentally in
washing the car parts (the car washing processes
have been scientifically divided into several
 -215-

simple parts, and kids are allocated their jobs

according to their own conditions). And most of
the time they feel like they are playing rather
than working, and they treat their job very
seriously, which means the car has been washed
really good, and customers keep coming back.
Besides the car washing, the center hire teachers
to help them learn language and simple math,
and they have rehabilitation center where special
designed instrument are used for the kids’
recovery.

Phase and trend: Nascent Stage, but grow well,

received a lot media coverage, Mayor of
Shenzhen had just visited the center. The center
also started to export their experience and
organizational knowledge to other province to
help others build the same social business model.

Little background of the interviewee: Mr. Luo

has been working in the investment industry for
the past years. He is very good at public speech,
and has been invited to a lot of places to share
his story. He’s a father of a mentally disabled
boy, and this is his major motivation to start this
social enterprise.
Founded at: 2004, Shenzhen QingQing Hearing
and Speech Rehabilitation Center. An NGO
Location: Luo Hu, ShenZhen
Social problem aimed to solve: Children with
speech and hearing disabilities are able to
recover and acquire normal communication
ability through professional training
system. However, the public was generally not
aware of this respect and they believe that deaf is
Founder/ born, which can not cured afterwards, and
6 Mixed Social
Director/ what’s worse is that they don't know the right
Female approach to the effective means of rehabilitation.
This caused a lot of social problems, the disabled
children missed the best period of treatment, and
disabled children's family was also
overwhelmed by the huge economic and
psychological burden, leading to social
disharmony.

Solution (Product/Service): The center founder,

 -216-

a teacher, Wu,XueLing is a mother of deaf child.

And after years of struggling and learning the
rehabilitation skills, and finally successfully
cured her child, she feel very strongly that she
should share her experience and create the
unique way of a customized teaching for each
child. Meanwhile the center pays special
attention to the children’s parents as
well, because parents’ attitude and caring for the
children play great role in encouraging the
training and helping the children build up their
dignity. For more than a decade, the center has
successfully recovered more than 300 children
with speech disability and helped them integrate
to the mainstream society successfully.

Phase and trend: this is the 13rd year of the

center, and the center has just been certified as a
social enterprise together with another 14
institutions. The center is growing well, and
actively seeking for the new design of the social
entrepreneurship model.

Little background of the interviewee: Ms. Wu is

the director and funder of the rehabilitation
center, deputy of the National People's Congress
in Shenzhen, mother of a girl with hearing
disability.
Founded at: 2014, Haining Nan-Guan-Xiang
Vegetarian Cultural Center
Location: Haining, Zhejiang
Social problem aimed to solve: The spirit of
common good, of social welfare, and a spirit of
helping each other in the traditional Chinese
culture needs to be well promoted in the current
Co- society, where people commonly pursue material
Founder/Dir things. On the other hand, a lot
7 Balanced
ector/ of consciously citizens also need a better way of
Male showing their goodwill and benevolence, their
trust in the traditional philanthropy foundation is
limited, they ask for a more interactive way of
doing social activities, rather than just a single
movement of “donate money”.
Solution (Product/Service): the idea is a crowd
funded vegetarian restaurant. People invest 10k-
50k RMB to become a shareholder, with a
 -217-

common goal that the dividend of the restaurant

will be and can only be repaid to the society, to
help people in the real difficulties. Meanwhile,
because it’s crowd funded, a community
emerged, where people have similar values and
attitudes, meaning they are more likely to have
strong ties and a more powerful executions on
those social and philanthropy activities.

Phase and trend: Nascent Stage but growing

very strongly with more people joining in, now
over 300 people invested money and effort as the
shareholders of the restaurant. Team leaders have
been invited to other province to introduce this
new idea of doing social good. The center (with
this crowd funded veggie restaurant as the
primary business) is certified as a “social
enterprise “ in the summer of 2016.

Little background of the interviewee: Mr.

Chen is an entrepreneur and a personal investor
in the stock market, and is a keen fan of Warren
Buffet. He keeps addressing that doing social
enterprise is very similar to doing traditional
business, because you need to have dignity and
honesty in you and others, and producing the
best product and service is doing the best social
value and social good.
Founded at: 2016, Chengdu Idle Goods
Recycling Resource LLC.
Location: Chengdu
Social problem aimed to solve:
1. A longstanding social problem, a lot of
modern people have idling goods they no longer
use. It is reported that the white-collar
businesswoman is Shanghai keep an average of
Founder/
Mixed 22 pieces of idling clothing. On one side we see
8 CEO/
Commercial this huge amount of waste, on the other side we
Male
see children in rural areas face great shortage of
material resources, they are cold in the winter.
2.Clothing donation and unused goods recycling
has been a traditional model for many social
organizations for charity. But the social impact is
very limited, and general public have concerns
the transparency of the whole process as we
commonly hear news on some people resell
 -218-

those donations for their own interest, making

people frustrated and gradually lose their faith in
the social organization.

Solution (Product/Service):
1.Using current information technology, every
single item can be tracked, and such information
is published online. And the company finish this
feedback in a timely basis, normally in less than
3 days, you will receive WeChat message about
where your goods is going, and how they will be
used for social purpose.
2.Different from traditional method that people
need to carry their goods to the location, Chen’s
SE will do the pick up at door, and send the
donator little yet useful prizes such as soaps,
paper towels for gratitude. Again, using WeChat
platform, they maintain the online community
very carefully and respond in a timely manner to
peoples request and reviews. In addition, they
also organize other social activity to strengthen
the ties with donators.
3.Bravely explain to the public that we are Social
enterprise, meaning that we are self sustained, so
for idle goods that are not proper for donations to
vulnerable groups, the company uses partnership
to do the recycling and gain the sustainability out
of it. And the company is confident and
welcome social supervision.

Phase and trend: Nascent Stage, but growing

well, and has received a lot of media coverage.
The team has now 4 members and can do 20-30
pick-ups daily, has a “customer/fans “ base over
7000, and is growing. They are now looking for
place to open a second-hand shop, which they
think is a good way of enhancing social
recognition and also to broaden the source of
“earned income”.

Little background of the interviewee: Mr. Chen

went to work at the age of 16; he’s done many
jobs and quite entrepreneurial experience
too. Before starting this social venture, he was
doing the manger job in the real-estate company
owned by his father - in -law.
 -219-

Founded at: 2013, Chengdu Green

Life Technology LLC.
Location: Chengdu
Social problem aimed to solve: We have only
1864 wild pandas living on the earth, they are so
precious not only because their adorable looks
which bring them millions of fans worldwide,
but also because biological values as a ancient
species. These wild pandas mainly live in
China's Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu province,
involving 49 counties and 196 towns. However,
in order to protect wild pandas and their habitats,
villagers’ sphere of activities is greatly delimited,
namely hunting, adoption of bamboo shoots, and
logging, hunting, adopting of bamboo shoot and
etc. are strictly prohibited. Although
government subsidizes for years, the living and
working condition of the villagers are getting
worse without the traditional
method livelihood. The fact is that young
generation chose to go to the big cities for work,
and the population near those panda habitats has
Founder/ fallen sharply, causing serious social problems
9 Mixed Social
CEO/ such as empty nesters, left-behind children, and
Male community declining.
As a matter of fact, these social problems are not
only for panda villages, the china’s other 2700
nature conservations face the
same dilemma: protecting the rare animals and
plants and giving up the villagers’ interest? Is
there a sustainable way? In the end, it’s the
people who near the habits doing the real
protection.

Solution (Product/Service): The logic is clear,

that we need to create a balance and sustainable
development among the pandas, the ecosystem
of the habitat, and the local villagers.
Firstly, Green Life came up with is a fair-trade
platform called the "Green life Ecomart”. On
one side, under the guidance of the law and
regulation, the platform help villagers to do the
habitat exploitation in a orderly, scientific
and sustainable way, through which the villagers
can make eco-friendly products such as organic
foods, healthy beverages, unique nutrients,
 -220-

cultural hand-crafts, and etc. The 196 panda

village, each has their own features, Green life
tried hard to design one unique village product
for each of them. On the other hand, the platform
use online e-commerce strategy and off-line
activity to connect thousands of conscious
customers, and products are sold and
job opportunities are secured for the villagers.
Generally, 45% of the product revenue will be
repaid to the villagers.
In promoting the social welfare thinking and
cognition, the “Green Life” combine resources to
organize a series of study tours (mostly targeting
the family and children) to the panda resorts to
educate people how’s real situation in the
habitats, to learn how the panda and people live
there.

Phase and trend: this is the 3rd year of the

company, and by the end of 2016, there are over
200 products on the “Green Ecomart” online
platform to sale, and they are from more than 30
micro enterprises and cooperatives from the
panda villages. The team keeps a optimistic
prospect toward the future, as more and more
people get to know them, and most importantly
know the real social problem that exist in the
panda village.

Little background of the interviewee: Mr. Zhang

is a previous chief editor of the business
magazine “China West”, and has a book
publication called “the truth of philanthropy”. He
is a social activist and famous social
entrepreneur in Chengdu.
Founded at: 2011, Buy 42.com ( ),
an online store selling second hand goods or
goods that some other institutions were not able
to cope with.
Co-CEO/ Mixed Location: Shanghai (headquarter) & Nan Tong
10 (Distribution center)
Female Commercial
Social problem aimed to solve: According to
Shanghai statistics, the unused goods in
every white-collar female closet reached 22
pieces, creating huge waste. Though someone
may want to donate those unused goods to the
 -221-

disadvantaged group, the logistics is both

expensive and slow in those areas and in most
cases things like clothes from the urban
people are not suitable for the poor people.

Solution (Product/Service): So why not keep

those unused good circulated among the urban
people, which can not only make the best use of
the goods, but at the same time creating job
opportunities for the disadvantaged group of
people.
ShanTao Inc. is a web based social enterprise
that try to combine the online e-commerce and
off-line “philanthropy store” to build up a
innovative social business model,
namely through online sales of enterprise and
individual unused items, plus all kinds of public
goods, and etc., to help China's 80 million
disabled partners to obtain employment, training,
and enable them to integrate into the society and
community.
Phase and trend: this is the 6th year of the
company; ShanTao now is one of the role model
of Chinese social entrepreneurship. The
company is growing strongly and gaining more
media coverage.

Little background of the interviewee: Ms. Yu

got her Master degree from Bentley University
in marketing. Her main job in the company is
about marketing and public relationship.