Routledge Handbook of Social and Sustainable Finance
forthcoming in 2014/15

Editor:
Othmar M. Lehner, Oxford

othmar.lehner@sbs.ox.ac.uk

Call for Chapter Proposals

This handbook aspires to encompass the most complete writings in social and sustainable finance to-date, including game-changing perspectives from leading academics and practitioners. The aim is to produce the standard reference work for students, academics, policy analysts and professionals.

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Social entrepreneurship (SE) research has been presented in the literature as a field of action in a pre-paradigmatic state, a field that lacks an established epistemology. Despite that impediment, several qualitative and quantitative studies have already been undertaken on the sole base of some institutions’ worldview and without previous solidification of theory. Consequently, critics and social constructivists have found much ambivalence in these and owing to the resulting mess, even question SE’s legitimization as a distinctive item of research. Articles on the topic of SE make use of a variety of frameworks, borrowing from neo-institutional or dialectic theory, bringing with them different research methods and views from other disciplines. Instead of propos- ing another conceptual approach and yet contributing to the ongoing discussion, the authors enact on a deductive journey by examining and clustering underlying paradigmatic assumptions found in a large-scale sample (>300) of current articles. In comparison to results from the management (entrepreneurship) literature, the study finds statistical evidence to the hypotheses that SE differs in researchers’ paradigms, that seminal SE research transcends the foci on either detached struc- tures or individuals, and that research in SE is often led by advocacy worldviews of the researchers themselves.

Crowdfunding (CF) in a social entrepreneurship (SE) context is praised in media narrations for its multifaceted potential. From an academic point of view, little has been written about CF as a whole, and enquiries from the SE sphere are mostly concerned with donation-based CF. This paper first reviews extant literature on financing social ventures and CF. Based upon the findings, the author draws up a schema of CF’s inner workings and subsequently discusses it in an SE context. From this model, a research agenda consisting of eight themes is derived: types and utility functions; corporate governance; investor relations, reporting and risk; opportunity recognition; networking; legitimacy; financial metrics and legal and regulatory hurdles.

The main argument in this study is that social entrepreneurship is not a neu- tral and static phenomenon, but socially constructed and loaded with meanings. Hence, it needs to receive adequate attention from more contextual, critical and constructionist viewpoints to deal with the inherent hybridity and ambiguity. It is discussed and argued that –a) current research on social entrepreneurship needs to acknowledge and even put a special emphasis on the cultural, societal and situational contexts in which it is conducted;b) concepts that are produced through social interaction should receive ap- propriate research attention that also acknowledges the ontological and paradig- matical nature of these phenomena; andc) while a variety of entrepreneurial approaches can be identified in social en- trepreneurship, such as for example opportunity recognition, these approaches differ in their actual application, partly due to the double bottom-line between the social and commercial goals.

Opportunity recognition (OR) is at the very heart of entrepreneurship. However, research on OR in the context of social entrepreneurship is still in its early stages. First, this article identifies, codifies and analyses OR-relevant articles on social entrepreneurship (SE) through the lens of Sarasvathy’s three views of entrepreneurial opportunity recognition. In the second step, statistical methods are applied on the results to indicate possible correlations among different schools of thought in SE and views on OR. OR in social ventures is found to be a prevalent topic in SE literature and differences in OR between social and commercial ventures are found.

There is little to no existing research on the phenomenon of social enterprises (SEs) in Austria. To enable subsequent comparative studies, the author first traces social enterprises’ conceptual underpinnings from most current research found in leading journals and subsequently creates a framework based upon social origins theory for use on Austria’s social enterprises. In order to validate the findings, the author employs a triangulated research approach, including an online-based survey, semi-structured interviews and two panel discussions. Social enterprises in Austria are characterized through social activities, organizational types, legal forms, the society sector, the outcome emphasis, and the strategic development base. The social entrepreneur him/ herself was included as a source for a qualitative triangulation as well as a distinctive item. Austria’s SEs are found to work in a multitude of fields, are independent, use market-based approaches, employ improvisation and innovation for the creation of social good and incorporate a strong entrepreneurial spirit.