International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing Volume 8 Number 1
Social entrepreneurship:
International Journal of Nonprofit
and Voluntary Sector Marketing,
Vol. 8 No. 1, 2003, pp. 76–88.
䉷Henry Stewart Publications,
1479–103X
Page 76
Towards conceptualisation
Gillian Sullivan Mort, Jay Weerawardena and Kashonia Carnegie
School of Management, UQ Business School, University of Queensland, St Lucia,
Qld 4072, Australia;
Tel: ⫹61(0)7 3365 6757; Fax: ⫹61(0)7 3356 6988; e-mail: g.mort@gsm.uq.edu.au,
j.weerawardena@gsm.uq.edu.au and k.carnegie@gsm.uq.edu.au
Received (in revised form): 1st July, 2002
Gillian Sullivan Mort teaches, consults and
conducts research in the areas of social
entrepreneurship and innovation in nonprofits,
m-marketing/m-commerce, international market-
ing and consumer behaviour. She is a lecturer
at the UQ Business School University of
Queensland, Australia and holds a PhD in the field
of management focusing on country of
origin/country image effects in the APEC region.
She has published in many scholarly journals and
regularly presents peer refereed papers at the
American Marketing Association conferences.
Before moving to academia, Gillian pursued a
career as a human services manager and as a
developmental and community psychologist.
Jay Weerawardena is a lecturer in marketing
at the UQ Business School, University of
Queensland, Australia. He has a bachelor of
economics, an MBA and a PhD focusing
on organisational innovation-based competitive
strategy. He has published in many scholarly
journals and has presented papers at reputed
conferences in marketing, management and
entrepreneurship/small business including con-
ferences conducted by the American Marketing
Association and the Academy of Management.
His current research interests include so-
cial entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial marketing,
new service development and capabilities and
innovation-based competitive strategy. Before
becoming an academic Jay worked as Market-
ing Director in a British mutinational engineering
company in Sri Lanka.
Kashonia Carnegie teaches, consults and con-
ducts research in the areas of ethics, business
ethics, creativity and business writing and com-
munication. She holds a PhD in the field of
ethics. She regularly presents refereed papers at
national and international conferences such as
Australian New Zealand Academy of Manage-
ment and the American Marketing Association.
Before taking up her current career she was,
among other things, a prominent broadcaster on
local and national radio in Australia.
ABSTRACT
The marketing in strategy dialogue and the
emerging marketing/entrepreneurship interface
paradigm stress the need for marketers to
research entrepreneurship. Social entrepreneur-
ship, the entrepreneurship leading to the
establishment of new social enterprises and the
continued innovation in existing ones, is much
discussed but little understood and given the
increasing importance of such organisations
should be addressed. This paper conceptualises
social entrepreneurship as a multidimen-
sional construct involving the expression of
entrepreneurially virtuous behaviour to achieve
the social mission, a coherent unity of purpose
and action in the face of moral complexity, the
ability to recognise social value-creating oppor-
tunities and key decision-making characteristics
of innovativeness, proactiveness and risk-taking.
The paper discusses implications for policy and
practice and concludes with a consideration of

theoretical issues and directions for future
research.
INTRODUCTION
The environment within which voluntary
or not-for-profit organisations (NFPs)
operate is rapidly changing due to
increasing globalisation, increasing needs
in their target communities, and a
generally tighter funding environment
with growing competition for donors and
grants. ‘Reinventing government’ initia-
tives, resulting in the retreat of many
governments from a vision of their role as
involving strong participation in ‘society’,1
have had a large impact by both creating
more space for more civil organisations
and attracting commercial providers to
markets, such as aged care, usually served
exclusively by NFPs. NFPs have been
forced to adopt a competitive posture in
their operations and to pursue innovative
ways of delivering superior value to the
target market and through this capturing
competitive advantage for the social
organisation.2 There is also increasing
interest in NFPs, in general, in ways to
avoid welfare dependency in programme
participants. These changes have gener-
ated an increased interest by market-
ing researchers in the role of social
entrepreneurship in NFPs. The resur-
gence of interest by marketing researchers
in social entrepreneurship is consistent
with the literature on the role of
marketing in strategy dialogue3,4 and
the emerging marketing/entrepreneurship
paradigm5 that suggests that entrepreneur-
ship and marketing are closely related.
The literature on social entrepreneurship
has grown in significance over the last two
decades, but it remains diffuse and
fragmented. Similarly, one of the major
foundations funding social entrepreneur-
ship has found that it still lacks a
clear conceptualisation of the construct
Sullivan Mort, Weerawardena and Carnegie
and must define social entrepreneur-
ship by what it is not.6 There is
a need to conceptualise the construct
more clearly, thereby facilitating fu-
ture practitioners, researchers and fund-
ing bodies in developing a consistent
body of knowledge, and embarking on
a programme of research aimed at
operationalising the construct and captur-
ing the role of social entrepreneurship in
NFP marketing.
NFPs differ from their commercial
counterparts in terms of their mission and
operational characteristics and therefore
any attempt to conceptualise the so-
cial entrepreneurship construct must take
note of these characteristics. Specifically,
with the increased competition, social
entrepreneurs are compelled to pursue
innovative marketing strategies for deliver-
ing their services while retaining their
social mission. In this paper the authors
argue that social entrepreneurship can be
conceptualised as a multidimensional con-
struct reflecting the key operational charac-
teristics of NFPs. The paper is a quest for a
middle ground between the currently
fragmented status of the literature and a
measure that will effectively capture the
entrepreneurial activity in NFPs.
This paper is structured as follows. First,
an overview of the theory of entrepreneur-
ship is presented. Secondly, past at-
tempts aimed at conceptualising the social
entrepreneurship construct are examined.
Thirdly, the proposed approach to concep-
tualising the construct is presented. Next,
implications for policy and practice are
discussed. The paper concludes with a
discussion on the implications for theory
and directions for future research.
THEORIES OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP
The term ‘entrepreneur’ originated in
French economics in the 17th and
18th centuries and suggests that the
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Social entrepreneurship: Towards conceptualisation
entrepreneur shifts economic resources
out of an area of lower and into an
area of higher productivity and greater
yield. Entrepreneurs create value;7 they
are innovators who drive the ‘crea-
tive-destructive’ process of capitalism.8
Entrepreneurs are the change agents in the
economy and they move the economy
forward by serving new markets or
creating new ways of doing things. In
general, early literature suggests that the
primary function of an entrepreneur is
starting new profit-seeking business ven-
tures. Subsequent literature, however,
reflects that this function is not considered
a sufficient condition for entrepreneurship.
In an extensive review, Cunningham and
Lischeron9 observe the presence of six
schools of thought about entrepreneurship
in the literature. First, the ‘great per-
son’ school of thought suggests the
entrepreneur has an intuitive ability — a
sixth sense — and the traits and instincts
he or she is born with. Secondly, the
‘psychological characteristics’ school sug-
gests that entrepreneurs have unique
values, attitudes and needs, which drive
them. Thirdly, the classical school of
entrepreneurship reflects the early ap-
proaches to entrepreneurship and sug-
gests that the central characteristic of
entrepreneurial behaviour is innovation.
Fourthly, the management school sug-
gests that entrepreneurs are organisers of
an economic venture; they are people
who organise, own, manage and assume
the risk. Fifthly, the leadership school
argues that entrepreneurs are leaders of
people. They have the ability to adapt
their style to the needs of people.
Sixthly, the Intrapreneurship school sug-
gests that entrepreneurial skills can be
useful in complex organisations. Cun-
ningham and Lischeron9 observe that
a judgment concerning each model’s
appropriateness depends upon the re-
searcher’s assessment of its capacity for
Page 78
explaining and improving certain aspects
of the entrepreneurial process.
In a radical departure some researchers
suggest that entrepreneurship can be
viewed as a behavioural characteristic
of the organisation. This school of
thought argues that entrepreneurs display
three characteristics in their decision
making within organisations: tolerance for
risk; proactiveness; and innovativeness.
These characteristics form the basis of
the behavioural entrepreneurship scale
developed by Covin and Slevin.10 Further,
the proponents of this school of thought
argue that adoption of a firm-behaviour
model of entrepreneurship has a num-
ber of advantages over more traditional
entrepreneurship models and theories
that focus on traits of the individual
entrepreneur, primarily because the level
of analysis at firm level is more appropriate
to understanding effectiveness and the
types of firm-level behaviours that result
in performance.
Recently some researchers have
produced a compelling argument that
entrepreneurial opportunity recognition
and exploitation are constructs that fall
squarely within the unique domain of
entrepreneurship and should be the focus
of research in the field.11 Casson12 defines
entrepreneurial opportunities as ‘those
situations in which new goods, services,
raw materials, and organising methods
can be introduced and sold at greater than
their cost of production’. This definition
requires profit generation as a precondi-
tion for an entrepreneurial opportunity,
which can be applied post hoc only, after
profits have been achieved. With a view
to reconciling this debate, Singh13
suggests that the potential to generate
profits would be an appropriate indicator
of an entrepreneurial opportunity.
13
Accordingly, Singh (p.11) defines an
entrepreneurial opportunity ‘as a feasible,
profit seeking, potential venture that

provides an innovative new product or
services to the market, improves on an
existing product/service, or imitates a
profitable product/service in a less-than-
saturated market’. Singh14 argues that this
definition is purposely broad and can be
applied to entrepreneurial opportunities
based on incremental market improve-
ments, those that are highly innovative
and create new markets, and everything
in between.14
The preceding discussion provides
the theoretical foundation in general
entrepreneurship research necessary to
conceptualise the social entrepreneurship
construct.
EXISTING APPROACHES TO SOCIAL
ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Social entrepreneurship leads to the
establishment of new social organisations
or NFPs and the continued innovation in
existing ones. NFPs represent a vast array
of economic, educational, research, wel-
fare, social and spiritual activities engaged
in by various organisations.15 Reflecting
this diverse range of activities researchers
have attempted to conceptualise the social
entrepreneurship construct in a number of
contexts. Entrepreneurship in the public
domain has received a great deal of
scholarly attention, especially as it relates
to leadership of public organisations
(eg Lewis)16 or development of public
policy (eg King and Roberts).17 The
proponents of this approach argue that
social entrepreneurs possess several leader-
ship characteristics, namely, significant
personal credibility and ability to generate
followers’ commitment to the project by
framing it in terms of important social
values, rather than purely economic
terms.16,18 This research reflects an attempt
to conceptualise the construct in terms of
individual qualities of leadership.
Social entrepreneurship within a social
Sullivan Mort, Weerawardena and Carnegie
action context has also been discussed.19
Here social entrepreneurship has been
seen in terms of the catalytic leadership
provided in areas of social concern with
the purpose of change, both in terms of
the area of social concern and in public
policy related to that area of social con-
cern. Partnership for a Drug-Free America
and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in
the UK are notable examples of this type
of action. Both these approaches belong
to the leadership school.
Similarly there have been attempts to
develop community models of social
entrepreneurship that examine the role of
social entrepreneurship in uplifting living
conditions of the poor and the un-
derprivileged (eg Cornwall).19 Others
such as Wallace20 have argued that
social entrepreneurship in this area occurs
through the establishment of social pur-
pose enterprises that trade precisely like
any other commercial establishment but
return the profits to a social organisation.
Some of these may also function as
affirmative businesses21 that focus on
the creation of economic wealth and
jobs targeted at the physically, men-
tally, economically and educationally chal-
lenged groups found on the economic
margins of society. This literature is
prescriptive, however, and in the early
stage of development.
Social entrepreneurs differ from business
entrepreneurs in terms of their mis-
sion. As argued by Dees7 for social
entrepreneurs, the social mission is explicit
and central. This obviously affects how
social entrepreneurs perceive and assess
opportunities, which will be addressed in
detail later. Several researchers have
adopted social mission as a key dimen-
sion in the conceptualisation of social
entrepreneurship. Dees7 argues that in a
similar way to a business firm the purpose
of which is to create superior value for its
customer, the primary purpose of the
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Social entrepreneurship: Towards conceptualisation
social entrepreneur is to create supe-
rior social value for their clients. An
entrepreneur’s ability to attract resources
(capital, labour, equipment, etc) in a
competitive marketplace is a good indica-
tion that the venture represents a more
productive use of these resources than the
alternative it is competing against. On the
funding side, social entrepreneurs look for
innovative ways to ensure that their
ventures will have access to resources as
long as they are creating social value. A
key feature of Dees’7 conceptualisation of
the construct is that of his description of
social entrepreneurs as a special breed of
leaders. Dees’7 approach to conceptualisa-
tion reflects the ‘great person’ approach to
entrepreneurship.
TOWARDS CONCEPTUALISATION OF
SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP
It is the authors’ view that several issues
confront researchers in their attempt to
conceptualise the social entrepreneurship
construct. First, the unique organisational
purpose of NFPs. NFPs differ basically
from commercial organisations in terms of
their mission, which is to provide some
form of exchange that results in increased
social value. The NFPs are also often
faced with multiple service objectives and
required to develop programmes to satisfy
the various needs of multiple sponsors. In
responding to a large mix of stakeholders
that may include government, clients,
members, sponsors, donors, employees
and special interest groups, NFPs face a
problem of balancing financial and opera-
tional objectives and organisational pur-
pose. Secondly, the environment in which
social entrepreneurs operate. For example,
the authors argue that the challenges and
opportunities that are being created by the
rapidly growing elderly citizens market
provide an appropriate setting to explore
the social entrepreneurship construct.
Page 80
NFPs, in the same way as commercial
organisations, must compete intensely
with other NFPs and commercial or-
ganisations for market opportunities and
funding for various aged-care projects.
The growing senior citizens market has
attracted a large number of private sector
aged-care providers to the industry and
this trend has posed a challenge to
NFP organisations to adopt innovative
strategies for superior aged-care delivery.
This context highlights the dual nature of
strategies that must be pursued by NFPs
for their survival and growth: those that
are commercially successful and those that
fulfil the social mission. These issues
suggest that theories of entrepreneur-
ship originated in commercial organisa-
tions while providing an initial impetus
towards, and a foundation for concep-
tualisation that are inadequate to capture
fully the processes of entrepreneurship in
NFPs. The authors argue that any attempt
to conceptualise social entrepreneurship
must take into consideration the competi-
tive environment in which NFPs operate
and the unique organisational characteris-
tics of NFPs which make them different
from their commercial counterparts.
Finally, in attempting to conceptualise
social entrepreneurship the authors are
aware of a number of current usages of the
term. Social entrepreneurship can be used
to characterise an innovative approach to
identifying and funding potentially high
impact NFP start-ups where the grant is
made directly to the social entrepreneur.22
This approach is also dedicated to estab-
lishing social entrepreneurship as a profes-
sion. The second common usage is that of
applying tools and strategies of business to
reframing the planning for social ventures.
Thus tools such as business plans, venture
capital and business mentoring are being
used by organisations such as Social Ven-
tures Australia23 to herald a new ap-
proach in NFPs. The School for Social

Entrepreneurs UK24 similarly identifies the
basic tools of social entrepreneurship as
fundraising, marketing, finances, charity
law and publicity. This reframing is taken
to be more consistent with a ‘hand up not
a hand out’ approach and may also be
more attractive for cross sector partner-
ships, as business people understand these
terms more easily and thus may more
readily understand and identify with the
objectives of the social enterprise. By
moving towards social entrepreneurship as
a profession, however, and emphasising its
business skills, there is a danger that its full
complexity may be submerged and remain
unrecognised.
Although social entrepreneurship is an
emerging but ill-defined concept in
business and marketing, a consensus
is developing that understanding social
entrepreneurship and the social enterprise
is important.7,25 It has been suggested
that social entrepreneurs provide innova-
tive or exceptional leadership in social
enterprises7,26 and, for example, leadership
studies would be well directed to the
context of social organisations.26 It has also
been proposed that social entrepreneur-
ship results in an organisation achieving a
sustainable competitive advantage allow-
ing it to achieve its social mission.2
Rather than adopting the approach that
social entrepreneurs are ‘one special
breed of leaders’7 or reflect an in-
dividual trait,26 which would hinder
capturing the behavioural characteristics of
entrepreneurship, the authors argue that
social entrepreneurship is a behavioural
characteristic expressed within a social
organisation. Further, the authors ap-
proach social entrepreneurship within the
framework of the capability model of
sustainable competitive advantage (SCA)
of an organisation.2 The capability model
posits that organisations possessing distinc-
tive capabilities gain SCA and that
distinctive capabilities do not merely
Sullivan Mort, Weerawardena and Carnegie
happen, but are built and nurtured by the
strategic leadership; for the social organisa-
tion this leadership resides in social
entrepreneurship. The authors also argue
that social entrepreneurs do not act alone,
that they develop and then act within an
organisational context27 and it is by
understanding how social entrepreneur-
ship is expressed and developed in the
organisational context that a better under-
standing of the construct will be gained.
With a view to capturing multiple
dimensions of the activities that have to be
performed by social entrepreneurs within
the increasingly competitive markets the
authors propose to conceptualise social
entrepreneurship as a multidimensional
construct. This multidimensional concep-
tualisation is justified for a number of
reasons. First, entrepreneurship in the
business context on which this concep-
tualisation is founded is itself under-
stood as a multidimensional construct. A
growing number of researchers suggest
that in business entrepreneurial behaviour
is characterised by risk-taking propen-
sity, proactiveness and innovativeness.28–31
These three provide the foundation for
the behavioural entrepreneurship scale
developed by Coven and Slevin,10 who
argue for the recognition of the com-
plex nature of entrepreneurial behaviour
within the increasingly competitive busi-
ness environment. Although applications
of this approach within the NFP context
have been limited, recent NFP literature
provides support for adaptation of these
dimensions to the NFP context.26
Parallel to the behaviour discussed
above, opportunity recognition has
emerged as an important dimension
of entrepreneurial behaviour. Similarly,
taking into account the social mission
pursued by NFPs, the authors argue that
in addition to the dimensions dis-
cussed above, entrepreneurially vir-
tuous behaviour and judgment capacity
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Social entrepreneurship: Towards conceptualisation
are important dimensions of social
entrepreneurship.
Drawing on prominent practitioner
ideas as they struggle to express the
construct of social entrepreneurship, it is
notable that these practitioner viewpoints
are multidimensional in nature. For ex-
ample, social entrepreneurship is expressed
as encompassing the ‘need to develop a
productive balance between mission and
money’32 and elsewhere as ‘practical
visionaries who possess vision, innovation,
determination and long term commitment
to social change’.22 Thus the multidimen-
sional nature of the social entrepreneur-
ship construct is justified both because
business entrepreneurship upon which it is
founded is multidimensional, and because
prominent practitioner groups also discuss
social entrepreneurship in terms of many
dimensions.
Having argued to justify the multi-
dimensional nature of social entrepreneur-
ship it is now necessary to examine what
exactly is meant by multidimensionality. A
construct is multidimensional when it
consists of a number of interrelated
attributes or dimensions and exists in
multidimensional domains. In contrast to
a set of interrelated unidimensional
constructs, the dimensions of a multi-
dimensional construct can be concep-
tualised under overall abstraction, in this
case social entrepreneurship, and it is
theoretically meaningful and parsimonious
to use this overall abstraction as a
representation of the dimensions.33 This
paper conceptualises social entrepreneur-
ship using Law et al.’s33 latent model. In
this model the overall construct is
specified by the latent commonality
underlying the dimensions. This is in
contrast to the aggregate model where the
overall construct is the mathematical
composite formed from the dimensions
and the profile model where only a set of
profiled characteristics of the dimensions is
Page 82
described. (Since a latent model is defined
as the commonality among its dimensions,
it can be estimated from the variance-
covariance matrix among the dimensions
of the construct using the technique of
confirmatory factor analysis.) Thus it is
argued, as shown in Figure 1, that social
entrepreneurs are first driven by the social
mission of creating better social value than
their competitors which results in them
exhibiting entrepreneurially virtuous be-
haviour. Secondly, they exhibit a balanced
judgment, a coherent unity of purpose
and action in the face of complexity.
Thirdly, social entrepreneurs explore and
recognise opportunities to create better
social value for their clients. Finally,
social entrepreneurs display innova-
tiveness, proactiveness and risk-taking
propensity in their key decision making.
The type of multidimensional construct
being argued here places the construct of
social entrepreneurship in the overlapping
commonality of all dimensions: it exists
only in that shared space. This may partly
explain why a clear conceptualisation of
the construct has remained so elusive.
Having described the nature of the
multidimensional construct, each of the
dimensions are now discussed in some
detail.
First, the authors consider the
entrepreneurially virtuous dimension
which is conceptualised as a behavioural
characteristic expressed in the context of a
social enterprise. It has been argued that
social enterprises are fundamentally
different from commercial enterprises.
They are extremely diverse but are
distinguishable by the primacy and
centrality of the social mission,34 be it
aboriginal dance expression or safe sex or
blankets for the needy, to the goals and
existence of the organisations. Social
enterprises have a spiritual or virtue
dimension very often missing from or only
latent in commercial enterprises. Social

entrepreneurs’ attitudes and behaviours
must involve a virtue dimension.35 It is this
virtue dimension of vision of moral
purpose that will aid in operationalising the
social mission, and differentiates the social
entrepreneur from the commercial
entrepreneur. This virtue dimension has
been little explored in the context of
entrepreneurial activity, although there has
been a long history of concern with ethics,
virtues and virtuous behaviour.36 Virtues
are positive, morally good values such as
love, integrity, honesty and empathy,
which must be acted upon to become
genuine virtues. More specifically, three
criteria have been established for virtue:
(1) That the agent is consciously aware of
what she/he is doing. In other words,
the virtuous action did not occur
accidentally or ‘coincidentally’.
(2) The agent must choose to perform the
virtuous action for its own sake, not
for any ulterior motive.
(3) The agent must continue to act in
this way until the action has become
habituated.37,38
Sullivan Mort, Weerawardena and Carnegie
Figure 1
Multidimensional
social
entrepreneurship
construct
The social entrepreneur then is one who
is socially entrepreneurially virtuous, and
whose mission is to create social value for
the social organisation with which they
are associated. Modern-day virtue ethics39
contend that many virtues are contextual,
meaning that a range of different virtues
might be required for different situations
and contexts. It is proposed that the social
entrepreneurial organisation exhibit not
only a range of universal virtues such
as integrity, compassion, empathy and
honesty but also specific virtues ap-
propriate to the social entrepreneurial
context such as ‘an unwavering belief in
the innate capacity of all people to
contribute meaningfully to economic and
social development; a driving passion to
make that happen; a practical but innova-
tive stance to a social problem’.40
Social entrepreneurs demonstrate the
ability to form balanced judgments. The
authors argue that they exhibit balanced
judgment or a coherent unity of purpose
and action in the face of complexity and
that this constitutes the third dimen-
sion of the proposed multidimensional
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Social entrepreneurship: Towards conceptualisation
construct. It has long been acknow-
ledged that one of the key features
of social marketing41 is the complexity
of stakeholder accountability. Stakeholders
are ‘those groups or individuals with
whom the organisation interacts or has
interdependencies’ and ‘any individual or
group who can affect or is affected by the
actions, decisions, policies, practices or
goals of the organisation’ (p.60).42 In
for-profit businesses, the primary func-
tion of the corporation is to maximise
return on investment to the owners of
the business, the shareholders who are
the primary stakeholders.43 Traditionally,
those with other bases for concern and
involvement, the secondary stakeholders,
take a lower place in consideration.
While for-profit businesses may be able
to discount broader stakeholder account-
ability, in the not-for-profit business, the
range of stakeholders, owners, clients,
donors, government, are on a much more
equal footing and the primary focus is
understanding and then maximising the
return of social value while also being
able to manage and develop the income-
generating capacity that contributes to the
long-term viability of the social organisa-
tion as a whole and its ability to create
superior social value.
Some emerging research has begun to
conceptualise the ability to develop
balanced judgment as the integrity
capacity construct.44 Those individuals
and collectives with high integrity
capacity are likely to exhibit a coherent
unity of purpose and action in the face of
moral complexity.45 The integrity capacity
construct has four related dimensions: the
process, judgment, developmental and
system integrity capacities.44 The focus
here is on the judgment capacity and this
is conceptualised behaviourally as a
superior ability to deal with complexity
and to be able to prioritise, weigh and
decide between conflicting activities to
Page 84
maintain the social mission as the central,
prime and uncompromised purpose of the
social enterprise.
Penultimately, it is argued that social
opportunity recognition, a central attribute
of entrepreneurial firm behaviour,11 forms
the third dimension of the proposed social
entrepreneurship construct. This attribute,
widely debated in recent for-profit or-
ganisation literature, facilitates capturing
the social value creation process of the NFP.
Based on Singh13 the authors suggest that a
socially entrepreneurial opportunity as a
feasible, potential venture provides supe-
rior social value to the clients served
by the NFP. In contrast to commercial
entrepreneurs who are driven by the aim
of creating superior ‘commercial value’
to their customers, social entrepreneurs
seek market opportunities that will enable
them to create better social value to their
clients.
Finally, the authors concur with Covin
and Slevin10 and argue that so-
cial entrepreneurs’ decision-making be-
haviours are premised on the same three
key dimensions related to decision making
that are identified for commercial
entrepreneurs, that is tolerance for risk,
proactiveness and innovativeness, ex-
pressed in the context of the social
enterprise. Slater and Narver46 (p.68)
suggest that these characteristics are
‘strongly associated with (1) knowledge
acquisition through exploration; (2)
challenging assumptions to create gener-
ative learning; and (3) the rapid
development of new behaviours to
leverage learning. These three behavioural
characteristics are instrumental in enabling
the social entrepreneur to create superior
social value to its clients while dealing
with a chaotic environment within which
the social enterprise operates. As
previously noted, recent NFP literature26
provides support for adaptation of these
behaviours to the NFP context.

IMPLICATIONS FOR POLICY AND
MANAGEMENT
The manner in which the social
entrepreneurship construct is concep-
tualised and the context in which it is
premised in this paper, have impor-
tant implications for practitioners and
policymakers. In the conceptualisation of
the social entrepreneurship construct, it is
observed that the traditional personality
trait-based ‘born entrepreneur’ approaches
are inadequate to capture the behavioural
characteristics of social entrepreneurs and
the environment in which they operate.
The model presented here implies that
any NFP can adopt an entrepreneurial
posture by displaying innovativeness, a
high tolerance for risk-taking, and
proactiveness in their decisions; by being
alert to opportunities seeking high social
value-enhancing activities and balancing
mission and facilitating activities. Firms
can be guided and educated to become
and remain entrepreneurial in their
decision making through strategic leader-
ship. This interpretation also has important
implications for policy planning. For
example, NFP key decision makers can be
educated and trained to engage in NFP
organisation-level entrepreneurship. In
practice, each dimension can be addressed
as providing guidance for enacting a social
entrepreneurial focus in the organisation:
put in place structures and processes
which help match organisation ability and
capability to real need; provide flexibility
in adopting new programmes and
exiting programmes no longer meeting
needs; foster social entrepreneurially
virtuous behaviour, such as inclusiveness,
balanced against the demands of market-
ing-based business activities; provide
mechanisms by which the organisation
can build long-term capabilities and
capacity through social entrepreneurship
that goes beyond innovation at the
programme level.
Sullivan Mort, Weerawardena and Carnegie
The conceptualisation of social
entrepreneurship presented here is framed
within an organisational capability model
of sustained competitive advantage.2
Within the increasingly competitive
market social enterprises are viewed as
entities competing with their commercial
counterparts and other social enterprises
for survival and growth. Similar to
commercial enterprises, NFPs are
compelled to adopt innovative ways of
perceiving and delivering superior value
to their clients. In this process, social
entrepreneurs will operate within their
social mission and the primary objective
will be to create superior social value to
their multiple stakeholders. This involves
pursuing strategies aimed at outperform-
ing their closest competitors. Premised on
the capability-based theory of competitive
advantage, it is argued that NFPs pursuing
the path of innovation must build and
nurture distinctive capabilities. Innovation
is a knowledge acquisition and integration
process and therefore NFPs pursuing
innovation, as a key thrust in their
competitive strategies, must build
distinctive learning capabilities. One of
the primary capabilities will be the NFPs’
capability to learn from market changes,
which involves monitoring changes in
client preferences and competitor actions.
Arguably, the capability-based framework
presented in this paper provides NFP
managers with a feasible path for
achieving sustained competitive ad-
vantage. NFPs aspiring to achieve
competitive advantage must adopt an
entrepreneurial posture in their key
decisions and such NFPs must build and
nurture distinctive capabilities.
DISCUSSION
Social entrepreneurship is growing in
importance because of the convergence of
a variety of forces such as the ‘reinventing’
Page 85
Social entrepreneurship: Towards conceptualisation
government, growing needs of target
markets and increased competition for
donors, grants and service contracts. Better
understanding of the construct is needed so
that the establishment, development and
management of social enterprises can be
better understood. Most importantly a
better conceptualisation of the construct
will capture the unique organisational
characteristics of social enterprises and
facilitate research into capability building,
innovation and competitive advantage in
social enterprises. The key contribution of
this paper is the development of a more
complete conceptual framework to capture
social entrepreneurship. The authors
started with the observation that although
the social entrepreneurship literature has
grown in significance over recent years, it
remains diffuse and fragmented. It was
observed that models of entrepreneurship
that have evolved in the commercial
enterprise context are inadequate to
capture fully the unique characteristics of
social entrepreneurship, but such ap-
proaches provide valuable input in
understanding the challenging role social
entrepreneurs are expected to play within
the increasingly competitive environment.
The authors highlighted the centrality of
the social mission in social entrepreneur-
ship but also observed the inadequacy of a
single dimensional conceptualisation to
capture the complex nature of social
entrepreneurship. Addressing all these
issues, social entrepreneurship was concep-
tualised as a multidimensional construct,
captured by the common factor underlying
its four dimensions. It was argued that
social entrepreneurship is expressed in an
organisational setting premised within a
learning orientation approach to capability
building and the delivery of social value
and sustained competitive advantage. This
approach not only provides a meaningful
and realistic path towards conceptualising
and measuring social entrepreneurship, but
Page 86
also for gaining insights into how social
entrepreneurship can be developed and
linked to ongoing capabilities within the
organisation. The proposed approach
provides a feasible path of investigation for
researchers aiming to build a consis-
tent body of knowledge about social
entrepreneurship by providing a concep-
tualisation that can be applied across
the many contexts in which social
entrepreneurship is expressed, for ex-
ample social actions and social develop-
ment contexts. Thus future research
should empirically test, refine and
develop the conceptualisation across
contexts. The proposed conceptualisation
also facilitates research on the emerg-
ing marketing/entrepreneurship (MEI)
paradigm5 that is relatively underdeveloped
in a NFP context. Similarly, the proposed
conceptualisation will contribute to the
research on the role of marketing in
strategy dialogue.3,4 As suggested by
Kerin4 ‘the functional role of marketing
in strategic management deals with
entrepreneurial work of the organisation
and organisational renewal and growth; in
short innovation’ (p. 332). Innovation and
its parent entrepreneurship, are tradition-
ally given little recognition in the strategic
marketing dialogue and this is particularly
evident in NFPs. The proposed approach
to conceptualising the social entrepreneur-
ship construct also potentially provides
valuable insights for both NFP managers
and academics in that it captures the unique
characteristics of NFPs and the complex
business environment in which today’s
NFP operates.
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