The Social of Social Entrepreneurship: Building a New Field using a New Paradigm

Social entrepreneurship is an emerging academic field generating a rapidly expanding literature on a growing range of topics. While the early stage of its development was nourished by many of the rich ideas developed within the “conventional” entrepreneurship literature, this is beginning to change as the social entrepreneurship landscape has become a more fundamental part of the collection of entrepreneurship practices. This paper considers the way that social entrepreneurship, as reflected in the aims and objectives of a collective of academics and practitioners, is beginning to develop a new research paradigm, and considers ways in which this research approach is different from, but complementary to, mainstream entrepreneurship research.