EIRC Internal Seminar – Nevena Radoynovska on Varieties of entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurial orientations towards social change in disadvantaged communities
Date: Tuesday, October 18th, 2022
Time: 12:00 to 13:30
Paper by: Nevena Radoynovska
Discussants: Cédric Legrand, Christof Brandtner, and Saulo Dubard Barbosa
On Tuesday, October 18th, 2022, the EIRC seminar was dedicated to Nevena Radoynovska’s work on the topic of “Varieties of entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurial orientations towards social change in disadvantaged communities”.
Her presentation really engaged with the audience and generated an insightful and profound discussion about impact, social entrepreneurship, and the pros and cons of entrepreneurship educational programmes conducted in socially disadvantaged contexts.
“Varieties of entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurial orientations towards social change in disadvantaged communities” by Nevena Radoynovska
Abstract:
Scholars and policymakers show increasing interest in the role of entrepreneurial organizations in addressing complex social problems, such as poverty and inequality. However, in an effort to distinguish “social” from “commercial” entrepreneurship, scholarship has largely focused on differences in the content of entrepreneurial initiatives, with more limited attention to the role of context. Moreover, by focusing on a priori definitions of social enterprises and social impact, most existing work misses the full range of outcomes pursued by entrepreneurial actors. To address these limitations, this paper investigates how entrepreneurs and supporting organizations in the entrepreneurial ecosystem define their role in achieving socio-economic change. Relying on interviews with these two groups in the disadvantaged suburban areas around Paris – known as quartiers or banlieues – in addition to field work and archival data, I find that actors pursue a much broader range of orientations towards entrepreneurship for socio-economic change than distinctly social or commercial varieties. I attribute differences to three main dimensions: how actors define the primary type of impact, target of impact, and theory of impact realization. The paper contributes to the literature on organizations and social change and to breaking down the dichotomy between social and commercial streams of entrepreneurship.