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This study aims to identify and explore the factors affecting social entrepreneurial intentions considering an educational institution in Portugal. It also intends to determine the relevance of moderating factors in the antecedents and entrepreneurial intention of these students.

A panel of 177 undergraduate students enrolled in a social entrepreneurship course between the academic years 2018 and 2021 is considered. The data is explored quantitatively considering descriptive analysis techniques, correlational analysis and hypothesis testing.

The findings reveal that entrepreneurial intention depends on multiple individual, organizational and contextual dimensions. Students' entrepreneurial intention remains unchanged regardless of the student’s profile. However, students' professional experience is a more relevant factor for the identification of organizational dimensions related to curriculum and critical pedagogy, while previous involvement in volunteer activities contributes to a higher prevalence of individual factors.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is original in exploring the role of entrepreneurial intention and its antecedents considering a heterogeneous students' profile. It offers theoretical and practical contributions by extending the literature on social entrepreneurial intention that can be used by higher education institutions to offer specific training more focused on the student's profile.

The purpose of this reflective paper is to examine the implications for the UK of Prime Minister David Cameron's declared belief that a Big Society of community entrepreneurs and volunteers will take on more and more responsibilities. Sometimes policies are spelt out in detail; this was much more conceptual and perhaps visionary.

Ideas on sense making and performance evaluation were used to provide a context and explore how various people might be expected to react.

Whilst the limited funding which accompanies the Big Society initiative will attract entrepreneurial opportunists who will be encouraged to bid for this money, if this new challenge is to succeed it must attract community entrepreneurs who see it as encouragement to start some new local initiative. Volunteering will be central to this. Positive outcomes are by no means certain.

As things emerge and develop there will be a number of opportunities for detailed and perhaps longitudinal research into the relative success or failure of the Big Society and this devolved approach to community enterprise.

Talking about the Big Society and thinking about the possibilities might well encourage would‐be community entrepreneurs to step forward.

It has been argued previously that “entrepreneurship enablers” are important in economic and social regeneration. They help make it possible for would‐be entrepreneurs to emerge and succeed. This short paper expands on this argument.

Examine and understand how an informal volunteer’s goals and actions develop from the moment they first learn about a disaster.

We examine informal volunteerism (the activities of people who work outside of formal emergency and disaster management arrangements) through the theoretical lens of entrepreneurial effectuation to explain informal volunteer behavior and cognition and gain insight on how they develop their disaster relief ventures.

We find that informal volunteers follow an effectual logic, relying on available means to take advantage of opportunities as they are recognized or created. Application of effectuation vs causation processes depended on whether the informal volunteers were categorized as traditional, emergent or extended volunteers.

Informal volunteers’ disregard for the Affordable Loss Principle task governments and disaster relief organizations with the important challenge of managing and assuring the safety and well-being of informal volunteers. Their entrepreneurial behavior also invites the establishment of formal processes to counsel and guide informal volunteers, helping them fill out the necessary paperwork and funding applications to develop their efforts.

Through their experimentation and flexibility, informal volunteers accelerate disaster recovery, recognizing opportunities, working around bureaucracy and other roadblocks that hinder the efforts of established organizations. They also demonstrate entrepreneurial behavior that helps revitalize and jumpstart the local economy, making for stronger and more resilient communities

This study borrows from Effectuation Theory from the entrepreneurship field in order to bring a much needed theoretical lens to the topic and greatly assists informal volunteerism research, moving from past efforts that simply define and categorize the concept.

The purpose of this case study is to allow the exploration of social entrepreneurship, environmental improvement and volunteering in the context of the UK's declared Big Society. Recently, there has been increased interest in “environmental” as well as social entrepreneurship. Volunteering is also an area of growing concern in policy circles, particularly with the advent of the “Big Society”, the UK Government's vision of citizen involvement.

The case was written with both secondary and primary data and with the co‐operation of Incredible Edible. Primary data include street questionnaires and semi‐structured interviews with relevant stakeholders.

Incredible Edible is an environmental initiative started in Todmorden, West Yorkshire. Basically community members – largely volunteers – have looked for opportunities where they could plant and grow fruits and vegetables that others could just help themselves to. Any spare land and space has been seen as suitable. From this the themes of local food growing and self sufficiency have taken over. Over a (short) period of years the initiative has grown and received considerable support from local stakeholders as well as extensive publicity. The initiative has attracted attention elsewhere and not just in the UK. But its real impact has been on the community and its sense of place.

The data have been used (so far) to write a case that traces the journey of the people behind the initiative, their motives and their impact. It explores a number of themes, namely: social entrepreneurship in action; improving the local environment aesthetically; the Big Society and volunteering; the local economic and social impacts – a new sense of place; improved diets and healthy eating – but also the impact on other local businesses which sell rival food products; how local successes can be replicated elsewhere; and the sustainability of initiatives such as this.

The case demonstrates five important themes that could be seen as a litmus test for the effectiveness of projects and initiatives in the Big Society – namely the presence and commitment of a visionary who provides the purpose and direction, volunteers, velocity – and emergence, visibility, and value.

This paper aims to present a contribution to the fields of knowledge management and social business. As the extant literature about knowledge management reveals the role of knowledge in the process of new venture creation, the authors argue that such literature can answer concerns and calls for further research on examining social entrepreneurship. This paper proposes several key insights for this purpose and argues that one key contribution of the literature on knowledge management to the field of social entrepreneurship is that it explains the poor growth of new social ventures. The authors also conclude the paper by explaining how the specificities of knowledge management among social businesses could create a new research agenda in the field of knowledge management.

Following the systematic literature review approach, this conceptual paper proposes a reflection that is based on the connection of two kinds of literature reviews as follows: a review on knowledge management applied to the context of new venture creation and a review on social entrepreneurship and its vision of knowledge.

The authors reveal that one key explanation of poor growth in new social ventures is not necessarily associated with a lack of resources, but rather an inefficient knowledge management process.

The first original point of the paper is that it links two sets of literature reviews that have hardly ever been addressed together, namely knowledge management literature and social entrepreneurship literature. Moreover, the paper reveals how knowledge management based on a “bricolage” approach could foster the growth of new social ventures.

Despite growing scholarly interest in academic entrepreneurship (AE) few studies have examined its non-commercial aspects and how it contributes to meeting grand societal challenges. One explanation for this may be the continuing focus of AE on intellectual property commercialization. This paper aims to address this knowledge gap by uncovering how universities can contribute to promoting non-commercial forms of AE.

This paper uses the human capital theoretical lens to make its argument and applies it to data obtained from exploratory qualitative research (55 semi-structured interviews and nine focus groups) in the developing countries of Bolivia, Colombia and Ecuador.

Universities can promote different forms of non-commercial AE even in the absence of sophisticated resources for innovation, through the stimulation of the specific human capital of the university community resulting from activities where they help others.

This paper proposes a general framework for advancing theory development in AE and its non-commercial forms, based on data obtained in uncharted territories for AE.

The importance of sustainable development has become increasingly significant in today’s fast-paced world. The 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) aim to solve a range of environmental, economic and social challenges, which requires global collaboration among governments and private organisations. In light of this, social entrepreneurship has garnered significant attention as it combines the social purpose of non-profits with the market-driven approach of for-profits to address SDG goals. Yet the cognitive processes underpinning the career decisions of social entrepreneurs remain underexplored. This study aims to develop and validate a scale to measure social entrepreneurial career decisions based on the appraisal of perceived challenges.

The study followed the steps of tool development and was carried out in three phases: item analysis, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).

The final 20-item scale focuses on the appraisal components in pre-entry social entrepreneurial career decision-making and has four factors, which are relevance, coping potential, knowledge and resources and normative significance.

The study contributes to the literature on entrepreneurial cognition, specifically focusing on social entrepreneurship. The scale could guide model testing and quantitative research in social entrepreneurial cognition. The four-dimensional structure identified in the study may also have implications for researchers interested in the antecedents and effects of social entrepreneurial decision-making.

Accurate measurement of cognitive appraisal is necessary to understand the perceived challenges and thought processes of potential social entrepreneurs. The scale could be used to examine the cognitive appraisal patterns among students. Social entrepreneurship educators and policymakers can use the scale to design and assess educational programs.

Distinct from existing studies, this scale offers a multidimensional approach that captures the stages of career decision-making, providing a robust tool to enhance our understanding of the decision-making dynamics in social entrepreneurship.

The aim of the study is to examine the development of four not-for-profit Chinese orchestras in Hong Kong, aiming to identify their key characteristics in management and operational practices, and highlight a probable proposal on how the concept of cultural entrepreneurship could be brought about for the growth of an orchestra.

This study looks into the cases of the development of four not-for-profit community Chinese orchestras in Hong Kong in accordance to the theoretical framework built on the reviewed literature. A self-assessment questionnaire survey was conducted among the key leaders in the orchestras, asking them to evaluate themselves about their features as a cultural entrepreneur, and the extent of the development of the orchestras towards entrepreneurship. The survey serves as preliminary reference data for follow-up phone interviews, with questions asked in accordance to the results of the survey.

The study shows that the four leaders of the Chinese orchestras have different qualities of a cultural entrepreneur. The four orchestras use different strategies to promote Chinese music, and adopt diversified approaches to survive. Four models of community orchestra having different features are identified, namely new generation model, affiliation-based model, mentor-mentee model, and developmental model. The findings suggest that community orchestras have limitations to the development of cultural entrepreneurship in Hong Kong, and they need the support of the right person and policy to grow and foster.

The results inform and give insights to cultural entrepreneur-to-bes and practitioners in the cultural industries as well as policy makers on some of the probable innovations employed by not-for-profit community performing groups.

Generation Z has already begun to impact our world, particularly through their social change behaviors, personal characteristics, volunteering, and entrepreneurial endeavors. In particular, Gen Zers around the world like to stay informed of societal issues, share information with others about those issues, and engage in personal behaviors and/or lifestyle changes to address those issues.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate what sort of people become social entrepreneurs, and in what way they differ from business entrepreneurs. More importantly, to investigate in what socio‐economic context entrepreneurial individuals are more likely to become social than business entrepreneurs. These questions are important for policy because there has been a shift from direct to indirect delivery of many public services in the UK, requiring a professional approach to social enterprise.

Evidence is presented from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) UK survey based upon a representative sample of around 21,000 adults aged between 16 and 64 years interviewed in 2009. The authors use logistic multivariate regression techniques to identify differences between business and social entrepreneurs in demographic characteristics, effort, aspiration, use of resources, industry choice, deprivation, and organisational structure.

The results show that the odds of an early‐stage entrepreneur being a social rather than a business entrepreneur are reduced if they are from an ethnic minority, if they work ten hours or more per week on the venture, and if they have a family business background; while they are increased if they have higher levels of education and if they are a settled in‐migrant to their area. While women social entrepreneurs are more likely than business entrepreneurs to be women, this is due to gender‐based differences in time commitment to the venture. In addition, the more deprived the community they live in, the more likely women entrepreneurs are to be social than business entrepreneurs. However, this does not hold in the most deprived areas where we argue civic society is weakest and therefore not conducive to support any form of entrepreneurial endeavour based on community engagement.

The paper's findings suggest that women may be motivated to become social entrepreneurs by a desire to improve the socio‐economic environment of the community in which they live and see social enterprise creation as an appropriate vehicle with which to address local problems.