Social Entrepreneurs as Institutionally Embedded Entrepreneurs: Toward a New Model of Social Entrepreneurship Education

2012

ANNE-CLAIRE PACHE IMRAN CHOWDHURY

Building upon recent developments in entrepreneurship education, we propose a novel framework for social entrepreneurship education founded upon a conception of social entrepreneurs as entrepreneurs embedded in competing institutional logics. Our model, in addition to teaching students “about” social entrepreneurship to allow them to acquire the knowledge and expertise required to successfully engage in social entrepreneurial activities, proposes to educate students “for” social entrepreneurship, by allowing them to acquire the skill of bridging three distinct and sometimes competing institutional logics: the social-welfare logic, the commercial logic, and the public-sector logic. To achieve this goal, we propose that social entrepreneurship education needs to make students aware of these different logics, to allow them to enact these competing logics and to enable them to combine logics when necessary to create innovative hybrid strategies. We explore how this overall strategy can be achieved by highlighting how various pedagogical tools can be adapted to contribute to each step.

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