Patterns of Meaning in the Social Entrepreneurship Literature: A Research Platform

Abstract

We offer an inductive meta-analysis of the social entrepreneurship literature. Methodologically, we illustrate the usefulness of network and semantic network analysis in identifying and interpreting the concepts that provide coherence to a largely conceptual and analytic scholarly literature, or indeed any set of texts. The result of this rigorous approach is an orderly mapping of a conceptual framework for understanding social entrepreneurship, including unifying themes, areas of contention and promising avenues for future research.

Key Words:

• Social entrepreneurship theory
• entrepreneurship theory
• semantic network analysis
• meta-analysis

Notes

Measures of betweenness centrality identify nodes that bridge structural holes in sparse networks and so are central in connecting nodes or clusters of nodes (Scott 2000). In the case of a semantic network, nodes with high betweenness centrality are thus critical in creating coherence.

We tried a variety of other terms – including social innovation, innovation, community, etc – but found no other terms that added additional articles in any quantity.

Books and reports were also excluded from the formal analysis, largely due to lack of access to electronic versions; however, several of each inform subsequent interpretation of the formal analysis.

Most of these articles appear in the bibliography; the complete list is available from the authors.

Because meaning so often depends on comparison and connection, the relationships between words are especially important for capturing the patterns of meaning in the literature.

Quotations without page numbers are from the analyzed text (titles and abstracts) as collected in the CRA analysis; quotations with page numbers are from the full text of the articles from which the analyzed text is drawn.

Most of the text underlying the social | approach (0.020) pairing refers to new, social entrepreneurship approaches to the provision of social service; the few texts that refer to methodological approaches are discussed below.

International journal of social economics, 33 (5/6), 2006 and Journal of world business, 41 (1), 2006, respectively.