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This study aims to explore the characteristics and backgrounds of social entrepreneurs, particularly in relation to what motivates them to start new social ventures, through an empirical examination of the phenomenon of social entrepreneurship in the specific context of Egypt.

The study adopts a qualitative methodological approach based on a triangulation of data sources, including extensive interviews from five social entrepreneurs, interviews with senior executives in their organisations and industry experts, as well as secondary data.

The paper proposes a model that integrates common characteristics and motivations among individuals who start social ventures. Findings confirm the characteristics of social entrepreneurs as compassionate risk-takers with entrepreneurial mindsets who seek to address social issues in innovative ways. They also have the perseverance to face the inefficient institutional frameworks prevalent in developing economies. Social entrepreneurs are motivated by social problems and challenges, inspiration, and previous personal experiences, as well as their social networks.

There are limitations pertaining to the limited sample size and single country focus.

This research offers useful and practical insights for current and future social entrepreneurs, particularly in developing economies. Moreover, the study contributes to expanding future research on social entrepreneurship in similar contexts.

This study makes several contributions to the literature on social entrepreneurship. First, by presenting an integrated model for the characteristics/traits and motivations of social entrepreneur. Second, it provides deeper understanding of social entrepreneurship in emerging economies. Third, it highlights the importance of personal inspiration and informal social networks as two sources of motivation for social entrepreneurs, in emerging countries.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the determinants of entrepreneurs’ subjective social status perception (SSP) on firm international behaviors based on the upper echelons theory and social class theory.

To test the hypotheses, the authors studied a large sample of 10,823 small- and medium-sized private Chinese enterprises from 2006 to 2014.

The results showed that entrepreneurs with higher status perception prefer international activity and firms have higher export intensity and intention. In addition, the social capital of entrepreneurs and institutional environment amplifies the positive relationship between SSP and international behavior.

This paper contributes to research on the upper echelon of management and extends our understanding of how managerial social characteristics influence international strategic decision-making. Besides, it also contributes to the emerging stream of social status research in international expansion studies and expand researchers’ limited understanding of the effects of social status in business settings.

This article advances a conceptual typology delineating the differences and similarities between business- and social-sector new venture creators. Our classification scheme differentiates business and social entrepreneurs, considering characteristics of social entrepreneurs in a larger entrepreneurial context.Within a conceptual 2x2 typology based on two dimensions: drive (passion vs. business) and desired return (financial ROI vs. social ROI), we identify and classify 80 examples of new venture creators into one of the quadrants of an enterprise model of entrepreneurs. Preliminary results reveal similarities between social and traditional entrepreneurs and differentiate social entrepreneurs in terms of traits, goals, tendencies, and motivational sources.

Young entrepreneurs' involvement in social entrepreneurship is gaining momentum, and the impact of their active participation in social enterprises is tremendous. As younger generation creates and leads social enterprises, self-identity that entails their leadership can bring benefits to various stakeholders. In particular, the engagement of younger generation in social entrepreneurship lead to positive identity development that brings impact not only to the founders but also to the employees, volunteers and recipients of the product and services offered by the social enterprise. In this context, the chapter explains the importance of social entrepreneurship in society-building, looking into how it creates values to its participants in regard to personal growth and development. The objective of this chapter is to elucidate the role of social enterprises in developing the personal identity of the younger generation. The chapter maps the characteristics of social entrepreneurs to the characteristics of young people with focus on the development of personal, social and role identities. The chapter also explains the significance of young social entrepreneurs' participation in social activities for the identity formation and how it directly and indirectly contributes to a balanced societal development.

Scholars have applied a number of theoretical perspectives to enhance understanding of social entrepreneurial opportunities, and have most recently turned to the lens of critical realism. Although this metatheoretical perspective overcomes some problems with previous views and helps to identify the essence of a construct, the level of abstraction required by this approach leaves unanswered questions related to how social entrepreneurs leverage opportunities. The purpose of this paper is to create a framework to describe social entrepreneurial opportunities in a way that facilitates action and decision-making by social entrepreneurs.

Through adapting Davidsson's (2015) deconstruction of the opportunity construct and using it to inform the pragmatist view of entrepreneurs as theory-testing scientists, this paper develops a framework for understanding social entrepreneurial opportunities. The paper explores the idea that social opportunities are composed of external enablers, a new social venture idea, and social opportunity confidence, and integrates the existing literature on social opportunities into this framework.

Using the framework developed, the authors advance a template of questions, hypotheses and quasi-experimental means that social entrepreneurs can use to determine how to move forward in social opportunity actualization. The authors also expand three categories of research questions that scholars may explore to extend the practical and theoretical understanding of social opportunities.

This work is among the first to adopt the pragmatist lens to elucidate social opportunities in a practical way. It takes an important first step in offering a means for social entrepreneurs to investigate when or where the requisite components of a social entrepreneurial opportunity may exist. Furthermore, it advances the pragmatist perspective of social opportunities by using Davidsson's model to explain the components of theories about what may or may not be a social opportunity.

The aim of this study is to empirically investigate the additional motives, aside from the social interests that motivate social entrepreneurs. This paper does so by using an inductive approach and specifically carrying out a re-examination of two pieces of research examining social entrepreneurship that were carried out independently by the two researchers in South Africa and Ireland.

The method used for the paper is content analysis. Research using qualitative content analysis focuses on the characteristics of language, talk and conversation (Sarantakos, 2005) with attention paid to the content or contextual meaning of the text. Thus, a qualitative content analysis is concerned with an examination of the uses of language. According to Downe-Wambolt (1992, p. 314), the aim of content analysis is “to provide knowledge and understanding of the phenomenon under study”.

The findings indicate that the informants do have additional motivations with respect to their business ventures including lifestyle motives, receiving acknowledgement and generating profit.

Few published papers investigate the motives of social entrepreneurs and explore if there are indeed any additional motivations aside from community interests. The results in this study identify that indeed social entrepreneurs are motivated by an array of motivations. The motivations we discovered in our research illustrate an individual who is mutually concerned with their communities, the environments in which they live in, lifestyle interests, acknowledgement and profit which may suggest that such community contributions could be sustained over time.

Scholars researching entrepreneurship argue that the distinct characteristics of social entrepreneurs, together with the particular category of opportunities they pursue, invite us to further understand social entrepreneurship (SE) as a distinct field of investigation. The purpose of this paper is to investigate opportunity recognition behaviour of social entrepreneurs and closely related unique attributes of empathy, moral judgement (MRJ) and self-efficacy, in an emerging market African context.

A survey was administered to social entrepreneurs across two of the largest provinces in South Africa, namely Cape Town and Gauteng. Hypotheses were statistically tested using correlational analysis and hierarchical regression with mediation effects.

Results reveal that social entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE) plays a significant mediating effect in the relationship between MRJ and social opportunity recognition. Moreover, perceived MRJ and social ESE act as important determinants of increased social opportunity recognition.

This study has brought to attention the relevance of opportunity recognition to social entrepreneurs, while recognising their distinctive features in terms of empathy and MRJ. While self-efficacy and opportunity recognition are relatively well established in the traditional entrepreneurship literature, this study extends the reach of these variables into the SE domain.

Research on economic entrepreneurship identifies a gender gap that is favorable to men. In the social entrepreneurship arena, the existing evidence is slightly fuzzy, as this gender gap is less preeminent. This paper aims to identify how gender differences in social entrepreneurial ventures creation are explained by different personality traits, by analyzing the extent to which female and male social entrepreneurs exhibit the same personality traits and whether potential differences are able to explain the differences in predisposition for the creation of new social entrepreneurial ventures.

A review of the literature on gender differences and personality traits in social entrepreneurship details the main theoretical developments and builds the hypotheses. Based on the Big Five model, the investigation uses a hypothesis testing quantitative approach. Primary data were collected through a questionnaire that was e-mailed and applied to the social entrepreneurs engaged in the creation of social ventures in Portugal.

The data gathered suggest that both female and male social entrepreneurs have personalities characterized by high levels of openness to experience, agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion and emotional stability. Based on the analysis of variance (ANOVA) between the two groups and logistic regression, the investigation reveals that women and men who launch a new social venture only differ in one personality dimension – agreeableness – wherein women scored more highly. No significant differences are found in the other personality traits.

The research assumes that most aspects of human personality structure are represented in the Big Five model.

The knowledge about whether gender differences are explained by different personality traits is critical to public entities that might design appropriate public policies to stimulate social entrepreneurship. Also, social entrepreneurs’ capacity building programs should be delineated in accordance with a deeper understanding about gender and personality traits differences.

The knowledge of the factors that affects the creation of new social ventures has an important potential contribution on social value creation and the promotion of gender equality.

This paper links two important topics – gender and entrepreneurs’ personality traits – scarcely explored in the social entrepreneurship literature. Thus, the paper adds new empirical evidence to support (or not) the belief that personality and gender matter in the decision to launch a new social venture.

This study aims to describe social entrepreneurs' motivation during the social entrepreneurship process and identify different social entrepreneurs in terms of their social characteristics.

The descriptive research design uses a directed qualitative interpretative approach based on 17 cases of social entrepreneurs active in healthcare innovation hubs.

The study describes the social entrepreneurs in a service context. Based on their key motivational characteristics, the study identifies three types of social entrepreneur: discoverers, seekers, and rangers. The study finds that not all of the three types regulate high levels of motivation during the social entrepreneurship process.

Depending on the type of social entrepreneur, the social entrepreneurship process requires different forms of support. In practice, the traditional R&D process deployed by innovation hubs is suitable for rangers; discoverers and seekers commonly regulate low levels of motivation when developing and introducing their social innovations to the market.

Most service research on social entrepreneurship focuses on the outcome; in contrast, this empirical study focuses on the individual entrepreneurs, their motivation and process. While previous research has treated motivation as an antecedent for engagement in the social mission of entrepreneurship, the present study investigates social entrepreneurs’ motivation in relation to the social entrepreneurship process, providing insights in the behavior of social entrepreneurs.

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.