Introduction to Part II — Exploring the Intentions and Opportunities Behind Social Entrepreneurship

Abstract

The process by which scholars are struggling to establish social entrepreneurship (SE) as a legitimate field of study closely resembles the development of the field of business entrepreneurship. Similar to business entrepreneurship, which even today lacks a unifying paradigm (Shane and Venkataraman, 2000), SE has taken on a variety of meanings (Dees, 1998), and we still lack answers to the following questions: How do we define SE? Why and how should we study it? What differentiates SE from other ‘social’ initiatives? And finally, what is the relation between SE and traditional business entrepreneurship?