Social Enterprise Education: New Economics or a Platypus?

Abstract

In this chapter, I attempt to explain the diverse nature of social enterprise education in higher education and review the content, placement, and pedagogy of various programs of study with distinctly different approaches. I see the approaches to social enterprise education falling into three different categories that I call accommodating, integrating, and immersion. The differences are explained by the problem of the familiar: the attempt to define the field in terms of the existing economic and entrepreneurial theories alone. Building on work of others I offer a new framework for understanding social enterprise and social entrepreneurship in the form of propositions that may be empirically tested and potentially could be helpful in developing consistent models for social enterprise education. These propositions are concerned with social benefits or outcomes, agency and firm, scale, and sustainable funding.

Citation

Thiru, Y. (2011), "Social Enterprise Education: New Economics or a Platypus?", Lumpkin, G.T. and Katz, J.A. (Ed.) Social and Sustainable Entrepreneurship (Advances in Entrepreneurship, Firm Emergence and Growth, Vol. 13), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 175-200. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1074-7540(2011)0000013011