Social capital as a driver of social entrepreneurship

Abstract

Social entrepreneurship is a field widely explored from multiple perspectives and within multiple academic disciplines. In parallel, practitioners have applied social entrepreneurship principles to multiple sectors and on multiple levels. This research investigates how social capital applied to social entrepreneurship can contribute as a driver of social enterprise. A systematic literature review was conducted based on searches of major academic databases (Web of Science, Ebsco and Periódicos Capes), winnowing an initial list of 3,106 papers down to 472 articles that underwent content analysis. The results of this analysis were summarised and used to develop a theoretical proposal and research propositions relating social entrepreneurship to social capital and highlighting the social entrepreneur’s social connections with the collective actors and institutions that together constitute social entrepreneurship. The discussion presented suggests that the interface between social entrepreneurship and social capital is a latent field for research and the paper ends by presenting a model to consolidate research efforts, identifying three key themes that recur in the literature: Creation of social capital by the social entrepreneur, social capital and its relationship with the institutions, and Social capital as a former of groups. In these terms, a future agenda is presented for debating these issues.