Women in Social Entrepreneurship: Outlining the Boundaries of Scientific Research

Abstract

This paper analyses the research on women in social entrepreneurship (WSE) performing a systematic literature review combined with a bibliometric analysis. Based on 109 articles collected from Scopus, it provides the sample characterisation, and identifies four thematic clusters using the bibliographic coupling method. In line with the findings, an integrative framework emerges, providing not only a comprehensive perspective of the four research themes on WSE, but also a sound basis for future discussion and research. Further, this paper holds several implications for the theory and practice of the different subfields of WSE.

Keywords:

• Social entrepreneurship
• women
• systematic literature review
• bibliometric analysis
• bibliographic coupling
• scopus

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 An article may have features that are not fully fitted with the cluster description. This occurs because bibliographic coupling assigns each article to only one cluster, which is the cluster with which it has the greatest commonality in terms of coupling strength. In fact, coupling strength defines the similarity between articles and groups similar studies under only one cluster. However, articles assigned to a specific cluster can be related to other clusters.