A Context-Responsiveness Framework for the Relationship Between Government and Social Entrepreneurship: Exploring the Cases of United States, Switzerland, and Lithuania

Abstract

In this article, we consider the status of social entrepreneurship and social enterprise in relation to government and public administration practice. For this purpose, we present and discuss a framework composed of three alignments. In the first alignment, social entrepreneurial practices and supportive policies, to the extent they exist, are fully bracketed within sociohistorical traditions of the place and cultural traditions of the people and groups in society. In the second alignment, governments have established or are in the process of establishing systems reforms to promote social entrepreneurial behavior that link specific policy interventions, or sociocultural interventions, with a normatively desired environment. This includes making system reforms that strive to break away from the historical and cultural biases that may have restrained social enterprises and in which legal, social, political, and economic interventions are fully aligned with one another. In the third alignment, the reforms designed and implemented are focused on the specific objectives that can enable and facilitate social entrepreneurial behavior like access to human and financial capital, access to markets for products and/or services developed, access to government decision makers who are responsible for establishing environments, and/or policies conducive to social entrepreneurial behavior and ventures. We selected three countries, United States, Switzerland, and Lithuania, as illustrations for our framework, given their highly divergent sociohistorical contexts, current governance structures, and comfort with various ideals and excesses of capitalist and social-democratic systems. This exploration gives the reader a foundational understanding of the concept and divergent approaches to implementation of a social-entrepreneurial cultural and policy framework.

Keywords:

• case studies
• context factors for social entrepreneurship
• public problem solving
• social entrepreneurship

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Philipp Erpf

Philipp Erpf is Vice Director and Senior Researcher at the Institute for Research on Management of Associations, Foundations, and Co-operatives (VMI), University of Fribourg, Switzerland.

Thomas Andrew Bryer

Thomas Andrew Bryer is a professor at the School of Public Administration, University of Central Florida, Florida, USA; chief researcher and visiting professor at Kaunas University of Technology, Kaunas, Lithuania; visiting professor at the Institute for Public Policy and Professional Practice at Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, United Kingdom.

Eglė Butkevičienė

Eglė Butkevičienė is a professor and a vice-dean for research at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities, Kaunas University of Technology, Kaunas, Lithuania.