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The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, this paper seeks to formalize a definition of activist entrepreneurship and differentiate it from social entrepreneurship. Second, this paper proposes a model that explains how the storytelling process, in the form of the message and means of communication, influences the activist identity process and consequently the legitimacy of the activist entrepreneur.

This paper explains the historical method and offers an overview of the unique case of Madam C.J. Walker and analyzes how she gained legitimacy as an activist entrepreneur by conveying psychological capital (Psycap) concepts in her message and political skill in the means of her communication. The paper also analyzed books being written on her and also letters that were exchanged between herself and her lawyer F.B. Ransom.

The authors have found out that Madam Walker used Psycap elements such as self-efficacy, hope, resiliency and optimism as message and elements of political skill such as social astuteness, interpersonal skill, networking ability and apparent sincerity as means to communicate the message toward her followers and built a legitimate social identity where she had won the trust of them.

The primary limitation of this paper is that it is theoretical in nature and uses only one case study to support the theoretical model. However, when analyzing complex relationships, historical cases offer a wealth of insight to solve the problem at hand.

By using the elements of the model discussed in the research paper properly, people could create a legitimate identity for themselves where any message they give to their employees, colleagues and sub-ordinates would be viewed as a selfless one and that would increase the chances of their messages or orders being accepted and obeyed by the followers.

Social entrepreneurial initiatives are often ascribed innovative roles for the public good. However, it is also argued that the same initiatives react to conditions in different contexts as well as to local or global trends. But, what roles and values are brought into practice by initiatives today and how can these be conceptualised as innovative? The aim of this paper is to empirically describe and analyse social entrepreneurship initiatives and contribute to the understanding of their role in the development of society.

The paper is based on a framework focusing on entrepreneurial dynamics, organisations and institutions. Empirically, it is grounded in four studies of social enterprises and their entrepreneurial initiatives in Sweden. Findings – The results reveal an intricate interplay between innovative challenges and institutional inertia as well as a combined role for social entrepreneurship initiatives in which innovative aspects can be more or less extensive.

The study contributes to problemising and nuancing the understanding of social entrepreneurship and social enterprises in relation to innovation in society.

Existent literature suggests that Africa is heavily endowed with agriculture resources and entrepreneurship remains an important mechanism for promoting national productivity and other economic outcomes. Despite these, empirical evidence on how agriculture resources promote the effect of entrepreneurship on national productivity in Africa is nonexistent given the abundance of agriculture resources and the need for Africa to increase its productivity, which has implications for improving welfare. Hence, this study aims to examine the interplay of how agriculture resources and entrepreneurship influence national productivity by way of exploring for threshold and complementarity effects of agriculture resources in Africa.

This uses panel data of 29 Africa economies between 2006 and 2016 in a bootstrap quantile regression model.

First, it is reported that initial levels of agriculture resources in the form of crop and arable lands reduce national productivity while the extreme increase in agriculture resources promotes national productivity in Africa. This implies a nonlinear direct U-shape effect of agriculture resources on national productivity indicating that the enhancing effect of agriculture resources on national productivity is only achieved beyond a certain threshold of average agriculture resources. Second, agriculture resources complement entrepreneurship (which initially reduced national productivity) to promote national productivity. This implies that there is a synergetic-complementarity relationship between entrepreneurship and agriculture resources on national productivity.

These findings suggest that governments that are interested in boosting national productivity through agriculture resources may have to commit more financial resources to develop and reclaiming more agriculture resources (in the form of crop and arable lands) given that some threshold of agriculture resources are needed to promote national productivity. Similarly, developing agriculture resources by policymakers can help complement entrepreneurship to further improve the effects of entrepreneurship on national productivity.

This study attempts to present first-time evidence on the interplay between agriculture resources and entrepreneurship on national productivity by way of exploring for threshold and complementarity effects of agriculture resources in Africa.

The purpose of this paper is to study management processes within successful societal entrepreneurship to further understand the role of management in customer value creation.

Management in three successful societal entrepreneurship initiatives has been studied. Data have been collected through interviews, direct observation, participant observation and documentation. Management tasks, activities and behaviours have been identified and analysed from a system view.

The result presents essential management processes important for societal customer value creation, their input, output and main focus. Some management processes are inter-related and are sometimes part of another management process. The management seems driven by “need”, “opportunity”, “interest” and “demand”, when creating societal customer value. From a system perspective, management has an indirect role in societal customer value creation and is important for possibilities to create societal customer value. Both the initiative and the surroundings have been found to be of importance to the management’s scope for contributing to societal customer value creation.

The study provides the possibility to understand and learn from management, the management processes and their role in societal customer value creation. Thereby, it describes how to successfully provide customer value to society and work with societal, environmental and sustainability issues.

This paper aims to discuss the ways to strengthen the contribution of scholarship to gender equity in practice for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. Research that spotlights gender construction and enactment, including its origins and its discriminatory effects on people, is inherently social action to the degree that it motivates institutional change. For this 10th year recognition of the founding of the International Journal of Gender and Entrepreneurship, the four waves of feminism framework is used to consider our conceptual domain and select practitioners in the gender × entrepreneurship field are interviewed for input on-field needs. Findings are that academics can boost equity in practice by doing original research and promoting research that is more representative, sharing specialized scholarship skills in activist arenas, making the results of academic research available to practitioners and policymakers, and reviewing and validating (or discrediting) information circulating in public spheres.

This reflective essay is designed to consider the relevance of scholarship in gender and entrepreneurship to practitioners who participate in the entrepreneurship ecosystem. The concept of the temporal waves of feminism, plus interviews with international practitioners, are used to inform the issues.

Findings are that academics can boost equity in practice by doing original research and promoting research that is more representative, sharing specialized scholarship skills in activist arenas, making the results of academic research available to practitioners and policymakers, and reviewing and validating (or discrediting) information circulating in public spheres.

Scholars of gender and entrepreneurship can look for and create access and meaning for their work with and for practitioners. Bridges to scholarship on gender (e.g. in psychology, anthropology, gender studies, social psychology) can be built to stay current and effective.

When pursuing a sustainable orientation (SO), entrepreneurs can resolve environmental and social problems and act as change agents by pursuing opportunities related to market failures. While many studies focus on entrepreneurial intention, very few try to explain entrepreneurial behaviour. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the circumstances under which people could be led to become sustainable entrepreneurs. It examines the effect of SO, as well as the entrepreneurial motivation to change society as key drivers of entrepreneurial behaviour.

The hypotheses were tested in three waves (six-month interval) on a sample of 197 university students that are neither entrepreneurs, nor involved in any entrepreneurial processes. The authors measured entrepreneurial behaviour as a dependent variable and used subjective norms towards entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial self-efficacy, entrepreneurial attitude as well as entrepreneurial motivation and SO as independent variables.

Contrary to the expectations, sustainability orientation has a negative impact on entrepreneurial action. However, individuals who think that entrepreneurship can change society (instrumentality) exhibit higher entrepreneurial action. Furthermore, this belief positively moderates the negative impact of SO on entrepreneurial action. In other words, if someone thinks that entrepreneurship can change the world, not only he/she is more inclined to engage in entrepreneurial actions but their values of SO will not decrease their entrepreneurial action.

A longer timeframe of longitudinal research is needed to overcome the limitation regarding the assessment of entrepreneurial action.

As a practical implication, educators who want to engage their institution as an engine of change towards sustainable development could highlight cases of sustainable businesses where profits, environmental and social issues were not neglected to improve the perceived feasibility and thus, entrepreneurial action.

Results demonstrate the negative effect of SO on entrepreneurship as a career choice, but not for those who believe that they can change society through this mean. This research highlights the relevance of Socio Cognitive Career Theory in the field of entrepreneurship, especially the neglected effect of outcome expectations on entrepreneurship as a career choice.

The purpose of this paper is to identify social entrepreneurship dimensions that emphasize the specific personal characteristics of social entrepreneurs (SPCSE) and social entrepreneurship organization (SEO) among students in higher education institutions who are active participants of the Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) program in Malaysia.

Quantitative approaches and instruments were used to analyze the profile of social entrepreneurship in this cross-sectional survey study, which involved 394 active SIFE students in Malaysia in 2011. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) was used to analyze the data and describe the SIFE student's SPCSE and SEO.

The social entrepreneurship of the SIFE students was high, with a dominant SEO. However, the dimensions of SPCSE need to be applied effectively to the students involved, whose social entrepreneurship was merely moderate. There was a strong positive relationship between SPCSE and SEO of SIFE students, with a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.73.

It is recommended that further longitudinal research be conducted to assess the depth of the impact of social entrepreneurship on SIFE students. In this manner, more useful information related to the impact can be leveraged to improve the pattern of the social entrepreneurship program.

The SIFE participants’ social entrepreneurship profile can be used by the Ministry of Higher Education in formulating social entrepreneurship policy for higher education institutions. The Malaysia SIFE Foundation and the administrators of higher education institutions should encourage more university students to participate in SIFE program to increase the number of social entrepreneurs who will help solve social, economic, and environmental problems.

There has been no discussions of the social entrepreneurship programs in Malaysia. This paper attempts to fill the current gap.

Several types of entrepreneurship with a societal purpose coincide in Sweden today, some stemming from older domestic traditions, others being more recent foreign influences. This paper aims to interrelate social, civic, community, and other entrepreneurships in search of a more unifying concept of societal entrepreneurship for Sweden and beyond.

As part of a larger study, Swedish researchers and practitioners promoting some kind of entrepreneurship with societal purpose, are interviewed and asked for examples and literature references. Altogether 176 actors are identified and 59 are interviewed. The main distinguishing factors between different discourses of entrepreneurship are accounted for as well as results from workshops where actors representing different discourses partook.

Seven societally oriented entrepreneurship discourses are distinguished, with different foreign or domestic origins. Key characteristics for interrelating different discourses are the type of actor (individual and/or collective) and purpose (social/ecological and/or economic) emphasized in a discourse. Interactions documented from workshops indicate a potential in unifying different entrepreneurships within a widened understanding of societal entrepreneurship.

The field of entrepreneurship emphasizing societal utility is fragmented with many parallel discourses. The conceptual analysis and empirical findings imply that there is potential in a more unifying concept. Furthermore, in the limited Swedish setting, collective dimensions of entrepreneurship stand out. This nevertheless implies that collective engagements into entrepreneurship of any kind are worthy of more research and recognition.

Implications are primarily limited to societal entrepreneurship within uncontested welfare states, such as Sweden, where most established societal needs are taken care of through taxes utilized by a public sector. Societal entrepreneurship in such a setting becomes a mechanism for renewal and experimentation.

The paper is original in its approach to identifying and interrelating current discourses in Sweden.

Sweden, and many other countries, has, during the twentieth century, developed a rather large public sector providing social welfare services to citizens. Only to a small extent were private for- or nonprofit organizations providing these services. During the last decade we have seen a shift towards more services being provided by private for- and nonprofit actors. This shift means that roles are reconsidered, renegotiated and reconstructed. In this debate social entrepreneurship, social enterprises and innovation are emphasized. The aim of this paper is to problematize and analyze how social entrepreneurship and social enterprises relate to public sector management and governance.

In the paper theories on (social) entrepreneurship and innovation is combined with theories focusing on welfare structures. Empirically, the analysis is based on the current policy development in Sweden and five social entrepreneurship initiatives.

The analysis discloses the relationship between the public sector and social entrepreneurship as negotiation of emerging social enterprise markets in which aspects as the creation of value, dependencies and innovation are emphasized. Even if the study has a geographical focus both theoretical contributions and implications for policy and practice can be of use also in other contexts.

Through combining social entrepreneurship with welfare services and public management this empirically based study contributes both to problematize and align the emerging field of social innovation.

This paper examines social impact investing (SII), a growing source of investment from the Global North to the Global South celebrated as a new way of doing good in low-income countries, but bearing elements of neoliberalism that can reify post-colonial contexts.

A microfoundational, autoethnographic approach is used based on the author’s experiences and emotional epiphanies while engaged in an activist entrepreneurial enterprise. The author’s goal was to effect positive social change with Indigenous Mexican producers of mezcal liquor.

Despite the best of intentions and following best practices for SII, the expected altruistic outcomes were eclipsed by inadvertent post-colonial behaviours. Neoliberal foundations of financialization gave primacy to the perspectives and egos of the investors rather than meaningful impact for the Indigenous beneficiaries.

Based on the findings, three areas are presented for further research. First, how Global North social impact investors balance the ego of their motivations with the altruism of intended outcomes for beneficiaries. Second, what ownership structures of Global North investments allow for social benefits to flow through to intended beneficiaries. Third, how post-colonial power imbalances can be redressed to give an equal position to Global South beneficiaries as people, rather than financial metrics indicating only that they have become less poor.

By using autoethnographic methods that expose the vulnerability of the researcher, unique insights are generated on what happens when good intentions meet with a post-colonial context. The neoliberal underbelly of SII is revealed, and ways to make improvements are considered.