Social Entrepreneurship and COVID‐19

By Sophie Bacq, G. Lumpkin. Journal of Management Studies, 2020

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COVID-19 has changed the world. The pandemic is a public health crisis with profound implications for society. It follows that research efforts focused on addressing societal issues such as social entrepreneurship (SE) – ‘the practice of addressing social problems by means of markets’ (Mair, 2020, p. 333) – will also be deeply altered. In this commentary, we reflect on how the current COVID-19 pandemic and future pandemics have affected, and will affect, research on the topic of SE. We unearth five fundamental assumptions underlying the field of SE that have been challenged by this crisis, consider their implications for research in the space, and propose future research questions to guide SE scholarship. First, SE researchers assume that it is social entrepreneurs’ prosocial motives that lead to positive social outcomes. However, to tackle social problems caused by COVID-19, many businesses stepped-up to create solutions benefitting the public good, without regard to their initial motives – e.g., manufacturers made plastic shields and ventilators, distilleries produced highly sought-after hand sanitizer – often offering these solutions below cost. While there is little doubt that these ventures helped others (the essence of the term ‘prosocial’), their founders did not necessarily express prosocial motives at venture inception. As such, the global COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the assumed link between prosocial motives and social outcomes to be potentially tenuous. If entrepreneurial ventures and established businesses can achieve positive social outcomes regardless of their motivations – for example, by rapidly deploying solutions in the face of a global crisis such as COVID-19 – and if social entrepreneurs driven by social motives do not always achieve intended social outcomes, this suggests challenging questions about the overlap between SE and entrepreneurship as research domains: (1) To what extent are Journal of Management Studies ••:•• 2020 doi:10.1111/joms.12641

Subfields: Business and International Management, Economics and Econometrics, Management of Technology and Innovation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a8ec8f5687084a45ecfbba6eefad35a7d7553321