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ABSTRACT
Social entrepreneurs do not work alone; they shape and are shaped by their entrepreneurial ecosystem. While navigating the ecosystem, it is critical to remain focused on the community, including beneficiaries and the end-user. After a brief review of the entrepreneurship ecosystem (EE) and social entrepreneurship ecosystem (SEE) literature and its evolution over time, we elaborate the active and passive roles of community within the SEE, considering both agency and participation. Turning to the capabilities approach, developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, we show its relevance not only for understanding the way community impacts the SEE, but also as a theoretical frame for processes and programs that aim to further embed community in the SEE. To illustrate this, we discuss the processes of asset mapping, human-centered design, and integrated advocacy; the way they relate to strengthening community-SEE integration; and the way they reflect the capabilities approach. We conclude by discussing lessons learned and providing suggestions for further research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Some research focuses on one element of the ecosystem: for example, requisite skills for entrepreneur success in local communities (Dahlstrom & Talmage, Citation2018) or local entrepreneurial culture (Breazeale et al., Citation2015).
2. Renamed Ontario Natural Food Company in 2017.
3. Hereafter referred to as agency framework.
4. The central human capabilities are life; bodily health; bodily integrity; senses, imagination, and thought; emotions; practical reason; affiliation; other species; play; and control over one’s environment (Nussbaum, Citation2011).
5. Lebmann (Citation2020) points out that membership in a collective can be externally defined rather than voluntary, e.g. based on a shared demographic feature such as ethnicity. Such collectives can also nurture collective capabilities.
6. Sometimes called community asset mapping or participatory asset mapping.
7. Movement lawyering is comprehensively defined as “the mobilization of law through deliberately planned and interconnected advocacy strategies, inside and outside of formal law-making spaces, by lawyers who are accountable to politically marginalized constituencies to build the power of those constituencies to produce and sustain democratic social change goals that they define” (Cummings, Citation2017, p. 1654).
8. Community role terms from Bacq et al. (Citation2022).