Abstract:
The extant literature on social entrepreneurship has advanced over the last three decades. The core purpose of social entrepreneurship is to offer innovative solutions for the social problems first on top of the financial wealth accumulation. Rapidly, the literature has nurtured to develop the theory and concept in social entrepreneurship while exploring the applicability of the concepts in different contexts and phenomena. Although the social entrepreneurship concept has been widely deliberated in the research agenda, the current stock of knowledge in the field remains unorganized. Subsequently, the primary objective of this paper is the systematization and categorization of the extant knowledge on social entrepreneurship in the research context. The systematic literature survey was followed in this study and 140 published papers were used for the analysis by eliminating the repetitions. The published papers were downloaded from well-reputed databases such as Web of Science and Google Scholar. The analytical methods have been organized twofold; first, a citation analysis was conducted in order to evaluate the prominent research in the existing literature in social entrepreneurship literature. Second, a thematic analysis was used to analyse existing themes and patterns in the Social Entrepreneurship literature. The paper exposed four themes that the social entrepreneurship concept has been researched in the field such as theory and concept of social entrepreneurship, institutional perspective and organizational management of social entrepreneurship, social innovation and value creation, change impact of social entrepreneurship. There are significant differences noticed among the found themes. Subsequently, this paper sets the way for future research by suggesting the gap and disparities in the social entrepreneurship research context.
