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There is a paucity of studies on factors influencing social entrepreneurial behaviours or actions. Against this background, this study aims to explore factors and challenges affecting Enactus members’ social entrepreneurial actions in Nigeria.

This study adopted a qualitative approach, and data were gathered through three focus group discussions involving 25 people (18 Enactus members, 4 faculty advisors and 3 business advisory board members). The study adopted a content analysis technique for data analysis.

The findings reveal that social mission orientation, desire to create social impact and social problems influence Enactus members’ social entrepreneurial actions. Other influencing factors include social entrepreneurial passion, moral obligation, social empathy and social support. In addition, the study finds that financial and time constraints affect Enactus members’ social entrepreneurial actions.

The findings have implications for social entrepreneurs/enterprises, governments/policymakers and Enactus members.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first qualitative study that provides insights into the factors influencing a group of people towards social entrepreneurial actions.

The extant literature provides much-needed support to understand marketing accountability and how marketing actions are related to financial performance (FP). However, we have limited understanding of the relationships between marketing actions and firms' social performance (SP) and environmental performance (EP). Understanding these links is critical to enhancing sustainable FP, SP, and EP. Moreover, the literature provides limited understanding of the measures by which SP and EP may be operationalized, or the data necessary to reach a conclusion. This study bridges these gaps by extensively reviewing the extant literature to offer a set of measures and data sources to operationalize SP and EP, and empirically show their relationships with marketing actions. We find that greenhouse gas (GHG) emission, environmental disclosure score, waste reduction, energy consumption, and recycling are prominent measures of EP, and that social disclosure score, philanthropy or community spending, and diversity of gender and race are prominent measures of SP. The KLD, ASSET4, and Bloomberg are prominent sources of data that can be used to operationalize SP, to which CDP may be added for EP. We also show that marketing actions positively affect EP and SP. This study contributes to the extant literature on SP and EP by identifying measures and data sources and linking marketing actions to both performance types. It contributes to policy development by identifying the importance of EP and SP and how marketing actions can help achieve such performance.

To summarize and evaluate John Levi Marin’s recent book, The Explanation of Social Action (2011), the central thesis of which is that the actions of other people cannot be explained without first understanding those actions from the point of view of the actors themselves. Martin thus endeavors to reorient social science toward concrete experience and away from purportedly useless abstractions.

This review chapter employs close scrutiny of and applies immanent critique to Martin’s argumentative claims, warrants, and the polemical style in which these arguments are presented.

This chapter arrives at the following conclusions: (1) Martin unnecessarily truncates the scope of sociological investigation; (2) he fails to define the key concepts within his argument, including “explanation,” “social action,” and “understanding,” among others; (3) he overemphasizes the external or “environmental” causes of action; (4) rather than inducing actions, the so-called “action-fields” induce experiences, and are therefore incapable of explaining actions; (5) Martin rejects counterfactual definitions of causality while defining his own notion of causality in terms of counterfactuals; (6) most of his critiques of other philosophical accounts of causality are really critiques of their potential misapplication; (7) the separation of experience and language (i.e., propositions about experience) in order to secure the validity of the former does not secure the validity of sociological inquiry, since experiences are invariably reported in language; and, finally, (8) Martin’s argument that people are neurologically incapable of providing accurate, retrospective accounts of the motivations behind their own actions is based on the kind of third-person social science he elsewhere repudiates; that he acknowledges the veracity of these studies demonstrates the potential utility of the “third-person” perspectives and the implausibility of any social science that abandons them.

To date Martin’s book has received much praise but little critical attention. This review chapter seeks to fill this lacuna in the literature in order to better elucidate Martin’s central arguments and the conclusions that can be reasonably inferred from the logical and empirical evidence presented.

To clarify and address questions that have arisen concerning John Levi Martin’s Explanation of Social Action (2011). I reply to some of Martin’s comments to my original review of his book (2012). In particular, this paper examines the distinction between first-person and third-person accounts of human action and whether third-person explanations of action are ever justified.

This paper concedes several of Martin’s points, but contra Martin, maintains that third-person accounts are sometimes valuable forms of explanation. This paper also concludes that the distinction between first-person and third-person explanations is relative to the actor.

A careful and close analysis of his reply is employed along with careful explication and exemplification of central concepts related to the study of human action.

Martin has argued that third-person explanations of social action generate epistemological instability and hierarchical social relationships between researchers and those researched. This paper expresses doubts about the generalizability of these claims.

To date, no extended discussion has been published pertaining to the social value of third-person explanations of social action.

It is an arduous process for corporations to determine if social action advertising is a complementary fit with their respective brands. This study aims to explore opportunities and disadvantages when brands consider cause-related partnerships as part of their overall marketing strategy. There are motivators and detractors related to social actions promoted by brands. It is essential for organizations, institutions and corporations to better understand if, or when, to use advertising that contributes to the social good.

Phase one of the study was a qualitative analysis conducted through personal interviews. Coded passages from interviews were aggregated into themes, which later defined ten social action advertising measures. The second phase in the study was a quantitative analysis (N = 506) that tested consumer involvement with the social action advertisement “You Love Me.” The spot was designed for the Dr. Dre Beats brand, in response to the George Floyd murder in 2020.

Brands need to carefully examine their own histories, political associations and concern for all consumer segments, prior to evoking social change. Differentiations arising from political views and gender identity are discussed. Regressions indicate “social ads that use stereotypes” was the key significant predictor of emotional involvement. Consumers feeling “respected and represented in social action ads” was the key significant predictor of fact-based cognitive involvement. “Social action ads distorted through virtue signaling” were 38% more likely to effect brand purchase when consumers viewed the social action ad.

This is a nonfunded research study. Respondents who participated in interviews, and those selected for data collection, were solicited through convenience and judgmental nonprobability sampling. These data are racially and financially biased. Seventy-six percent of respondents in the racial variable were white; 51% stated they were “wealthy and have a lot of assets.” Neither variable is representative of the general population. In the future, researchers should collect a nonbiased stratified probability sample that would more closely reflect the general population and consumer audience.

This paper builds on the recommendations of Farrukh et al. (2021) who call for more published research in the areas of human rights violations and social change. The results of this study represent a cautionary tale. Political dogma within a polarized society has created pressure for chief marketing officers to integrate political values into brand values. The risk of creating adversarial factions has created a risky environment for brand developers and strategists (Mahoney, 2022).

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between social capital and collective action at the county level in the US while incorporating the moderating effects of community racial diversity and urbanity and to find the changing effects of social capital on philanthropic collective action for community education.

This paper employs a quantitative research design. The dependent variable measures philanthropic collective action for community education while the independent variable for social capital is measured as a community level index. Moderating variables include a community racial diversity index and urbanity. This analysis tests and interprets interaction effects using moderated multiple regression (MMR), with the baselines of MMR being grounded to multivariate ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. Analyses are carried out in the context of the USA during 2006 and 2010, with US counties employed as the unit of analysis.

The effects of social capital on philanthropic contributions decline in counties with low- and mid-levels of racial diversity. On the contrary, the effects of social capital increase in highly racially diverse counties. The three-way interaction model result suggests that racial diversity positively moderates social capital on philanthropic collective action for community education where the effect of social capital is strong and positive in highly racially diverse urban communities.

This research complicates the notion that social capital and racial diversity are negatively associated when exploring collective action and community education, and suggests effects of social capital varies with moderating effects on philanthropic collective action for community education.