Social Entrepreneurship and Social Work: The Need for a Transdisciplinary Educational Model

Abstract

Increasingly, human service agencies are facing revenue shortfalls, which are endangering important social programs. Unless human service leaders find sustainable revenue sources to support programmatic efforts, their programs will remain financially unstable. Social entrepreneurship (SE), which balances organizational economic and social goals, offers one possible solution. Unfortunately, very few human service administration programs offer SE training, and those that do utilize a mono-disciplinary education model. In truth, effective SE requires skills/knowledge that traverse various academic disciplines and community groups. The authors recommend that human service administration programs collaborate and offer transdisciplinary, problem-based SE programs to prepare human service administrators.

Keywords:

• problem-based learning
• social entrepreneurship
• sustainable revenue
• transdisciplinary educational model
• university human service administration programs

Notes

¹e.g., http://www.bc.edu/content/bc/schools/gssw/academics/msw/social-innovation.html; http://www.columbia.edu/cu/ssw/bulletin/2010-2011/02msprog.html, http://www.bc.edu/content/bc/schools/gssw/academics/msw/social-innovation.html; http://www.socialwork.illinois.edu/current_students/documents/2011-2012_MSW_Handbook.pdf; http://www.pdx.edu/ssw/course-descriptions-msw-program-portland; http://web.uncg.edu/reg/Bulletin/1112VA/SWK/Courses500-599.aspx.

²For the purposes of this discussion, multidisciplinary refers to collaborations that combine, not integrate, disciplinary perspectives; interdisciplinary collaboration refers to “the reciprocal interaction between … disciplines, necessitating a blurring of disciplinary boundaries, in order to generate new common methodologies, perspectives, knowledge, or even new disciplines” (Choi & Pak, 2006, p. 359). Transdisciplinary collaboration transcends disciplinary boundaries to involve disciplines as well as other stakeholders (e.g., students, community members) to examine “the dynamics of whole systems in a holistic way” (Choi & Pak, 2006, p. 359).