Social Entrepreneurship and Social Capital: A Review of Impact Research

Abstract

This study analyzes social capital as a mediator/moderator of social value creation in social entrepreneurship (SE); thus, we adopted a mixed methods review that was performed in two stages. In the first stage, we overviewed the reviews in order to summarize key findings from the analysis of social entrepreneurship. At this stage, the aim was to show the gap in the existing research, with an explicit focus on impact generation and measuring that impact within social enterprises. Then, we conducted a literature review focusing on studies that analyse the relationship between social entrepreneurship and social capital. Our assumption is that social capital is an impact generation mechanism that works at different interaction levels. Our analysis identifies three pathways which show how social entrepreneurship can have an impact, and how it can be generated by higher levels of social capital. These three pathways involve productivity, community resilience, and institutional development. The proposed classification of the empirically identified SE impact pathways offers insights that are useful to informing the available approaches concerning social impact creation and methods which approximate tangible SE outcomes. In addition, the mediator/moderator approach to social capital identifies these pathways as being complementary value creation processes.