Two Paths Diverged

Abstract

This research examines the antecedents that motivate and prepare social entrepreneurs to begin social ventures. Drawing from in-depth interviews with 20 social entrepreneurs, this research reveals that there are two paths to social entrepreneurship: the activist path and the business path. Both activist and business social entrepreneurs were motivated by a family legacy or a transformative early adulthood experience as the moral basis for forming a social venture, and both suggested that prior work experience was instrumental in helping them launch their social venture. However, activist social entrepreneurs were likely to form their social venture as a continuation of their ongoing work on a social issue. In contrast, business social entrepreneurs’ first activity on a social issue was to form a social venture. This research suggests that these two different paths to social entrepreneurship result in different types of social ventures.

Keywords

nongovernment organizations socialization entrepreneurship activism

The third sector, including community organizations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and sector-blurring social enterprises are growing at an unprecedented rate (Kirby & Koschmann, 2012; Yaziji & Doh, 2009). Despite their exponential growth, little is known about how those organizations are founded. Moreover, researchers have not examined how social entrepreneurs gain skills to overcome economic, social, and institutional barriers to establish organizations that address a variety of societal needs (Robinson, 2006).

The purpose of this research was to examine the antecedents of social entrepreneurship. Drawing from in-depth interviews with 20 social entrepreneurs at various stages of their entrepreneurial efforts, this research examines the experiences and information that social entrepreneurs suggest motivate and aid them in founding a social venture. The results of this research suggest that there are two distinct paths to social entrepreneurship: the business path and the activist path. The key difference between the paths is whether the entrepreneur had previous experience in an organization addressing their social issue before founding their own initiative.

Social Entrepreneurship

The study of social entrepreneurship is in its earliest stages (Mair, Robinson, & Hockerts, 2006; Nicholls, 2010). In fact, according to Nicholls (2010), social entrepreneurship as a field of action “currently lacks an established epistemology” (p. 611). In other words, there is no consensual understanding of what social entrepreneurship means. It has been variously presented as a response to state failures in welfare provision (LeGrand, 2003), a new model of systemic social change (Nicholls, 2006), a new market opportunity for business (Prahalad, 2005), and a model of political empowerment and transformation (Yunus, 2008). For the purposes of this study, social entrepreneurship is thus defined broadly following Mair and Noboa (2006) as the “innovative use of resource combinations to pursue opportunities aiming at the creation of organizations and/or practices that yield and sustain social benefits” (p. 122). Social entrepreneurs can be individuals, groups, or organizations (Bolton & Thompson, 2004).

Although previous research and theorizing have suggested various explanations for social entrepreneurship (Austin, 2006; Cho, 2006), this research embraces the Austrian (Kirzner, 1997) and evolutionary theories of organizations (Aldrich & Kenworthy, 1999; Aldrich & Ruef, 2006), which suggest that local experience and context explain entrepreneurship. Shane (2000) summarizes the approach as follows: “1) people cannot recognize all entrepreneurial opportunities; 2) information about opportunities, rather than fundamental attributes of people, determine who becomes an entrepreneur; and 3) this process depends on factors other than people’s ability and willingness to take action” (p. 450).

Social entrepreneurs’ primary action in forming a social venture involves moving a promising idea into an attractive opportunity (Guclu, Dees, & Anderson, 2002). They do this by creating a recognizable entity that has legitimacy, can accrue resources, and can become a site of identification and action for staff, volunteers, donors, and/or ventures. To create such an entity, the social entrepreneur must create a legitimized and bounded set of activities and routines. This process includes communicative (e.g., soliciting support, naming the organization), financial (e.g., accumulating capital resources for startup), and legal activities (e.g., registration under correct legal framework).

However, social entrepreneurs do not just enact a professional role when they found a social venture; they also undergo a process of identity transformation. As noted by Ashforth and Saks (1995) and Nicholson (1984), role changes, such as becoming a social entrepreneur for the first time or founding a new organization, often lead to a new synchronization of personal and role identities. Distinct from other types of role transitions, social entrepreneurs have very high role discretion. This means that they can shape their role with greater freedom and less constraint, than those who are entering an existing organization and/or entering an existing organization role. According to Nicholson and subsequent research by Ashforth and Saks (1995), this means that alignment of role and personal identities will include a high degree of role development, or the process by which “the person tries to change role requirements so that they better match his or her needs, abilities, and identities” (Nicholson, 1984, p. 175). The unique consequences of this role development include the founding of social ventures peculiar to the existing or newly developed personal identity of the social entrepreneur and widely varying roles for that founder.

Social entrepreneurs have a variety of resources to draw from in their identity transformation. These include the combinations of early personal experiences (Ibarra, 1999), education, and earlier career and volunteer experiences. Previous research on anticipatory socialization describes different types of communicative resources from which social entrepreneurs may draw as they align their personal and role identities.

Vocational Anticipatory Socialization (VAS) to Social Entrepreneurship

VAS (Jablin, 2001) is a process whereby an individual, usually in late childhood and early adulthood, gathers information about different possible occupations and compares the fit of that information with their self-concept. In this regard, we suggest that social entrepreneurs are influenced by VAS when they form organizations in similar ways that organizational entrants are influenced by anticipatory knowledge. Our application builds on the current understanding of VAS by including entrepreneurs as a distinct occupational field that is significantly different from other professions. Given that many entrepreneurs come to their work as a secondary career, this research extends the VAS model proposed by Jablin (2001), in which socialization typically takes place prior to starting one’s career. As anticipatory socialization generally involves information gained, we draw upon individuals’ lived experiences, including their (a) family history; (b) social, moral, and educational background; (c) prior organizational experience in the social market; and (d) previous entrepreneurship experience. We explain these below.

Family Background and History

In the communication literature, family background and history have been identified as important sources of VAS (Jablin, 2001; Lucas, 2011). Indeed, as they grow up, young people intentionally and unintentionally gather from family interactions information they will eventually use in determining the nature and direction of their respective careers (Lucas, 2011; Myers, Jahn, Gailliard, & Stoltzfus, 2011). Roberts (1991) has suggested that “entrepreneurial heritage” was an important element for high technology entrepreneurs. Fathers of high technology entrepreneurs were not high technology entrepreneurs themselves, but self-employed professionals and independent business owners. Roberts concluded that entrepreneurs benefit from family history because unique business information is made available to them through family table talk. Likewise, social entrepreneurs’ families may include activists, religious leaders, volunteers, or small business owners. Early family interactions may sensitize social entrepreneurs to particular social issues or provide familiarity with organizing principles.

Social, Moral, and Educational Background

The importance of individuals’ social, moral, and educational background in VAS has also been examined in communication studies (Jablin, 2001; Kramer, 2011; Myers et al., 2011), albeit not in the context of social entrepreneurship. According to Jablin (2001), families, friends, and educational institutions, through the values and principles they convey, help individuals develop and mimic behaviors and attitudes that influence their vocational choices. For instance, an individual raised in a strongly religious family may take religious values into account when making decisions about career choices. In the context of social entrepreneurship, such background may enhance the cognitive and emotional empathy necessary for social entrepreneurship to appear desirable (Mair & Noboa, 2006).

Prior Organizational Experience in the Social Market

Entrepreneurship literature suggests that prior experience in an industry plays an important role in entrepreneurial activities. According to Bolton and Thompson (2004), 90% of entrepreneurs start a business in the same industry in which they work. They suggest that prior experience in a particular industry has two advantages: (a) allowing entrepreneurs to observe what works and what does not work in a particular industry before trying it themselves and (b) allowing entrepreneurs to identify role models. Aldrich and Ruef (2006) note that the network of ties formed during prior work experience is a valuable source of ideas, opportunities, and information for entrepreneurs.

Evolutionary theory’s description of entrepreneurship suggests an extension to the VAS framework; although VAS suggests that early job experiences help inform young people about the nature of work and the type of work they hope to do (Jablin, 2001; Myers et al., 2011), it does not extend to early career experience in a social market. For many social entrepreneurs, founding a social venture represents a career change. Thus, much like Tan and Kramer (2012), we are examining secondary careers. However, unlike these authors, we examine the path that led to the second career stretching back beyond the immediate circumstances of turnover, suggesting that the duration of these career experiences and the networks they enable provide important socialization for the formation of a social venture.

Previous Social Entrepreneurship Experience

Finally, evolutionary research suggests that many entrepreneurs have failed ventures before they have successful ones (Aldrich & Kenworthy, 1999). Prabhu (1999) suggests that prior entrepreneurial experience helps social entrepreneurs develop the necessary confidence and self-efficacy to successfully begin a venture. In the communication literature, studies of VAS (Kramer, 2011; Stephens & Dailey, 2012) have suggested that individuals’ prior or concurrent organizational experiences shape their future work experiences, professional choices, and career development. Thus, prior entrepreneurship experience may play an important role in successful social entrepreneurship.

This study focuses on the antecedents to social entrepreneurship. The evolutionary theory of entrepreneurship (Shane, 2000) and VAS (Jablin, 2001) suggests that individuals encounter different information about entrepreneurial opportunities along their history. The different information, not any individual attributes or differences in motivation, influences both individuals’ desire to form a social venture and the type of social venture they begin. Therefore, this research investigates the following questions:

Research Question (RQ1): What information and experiences do social entrepreneurs suggest motivated them to begin their social ventures?

Research Question (RQ2): What information and experiences do social entrepreneurs attribute as instrumental in preparing them to begin their social venture?

Method

Participants and Procedure

Participants in this study were recruited using both direct inquiries and referrals, first from the researchers’ personal contacts and second from referrals from a university’s community relations department and social entrepreneurship institute. Twenty-three individuals participated. Three of the individuals transformed existing social ventures but did not begin the social venture, and were excluded from the analysis. Fifteen of the remaining 20 interviewees had founded their social venture and continued to work with their organization, two had founded and left their social project, and three interviewees were in the process of setting up their project. Three of the 20 participants were part of a social entrepreneurship team that had begun a common social venture. One of the interviewees required the interview to be conducted via a translator due to a disability. Nine of the social entrepreneurs had started more than one social venture. Twelve of the 20 interviewees were female. All but one interviewee lived in the United States. The exception was a female social entrepreneur who lived and began her venture in Malaysia.

This research used in-depth, semi-structured interviewing to develop profiles of each social entrepreneur. The interview questions covered (a) family history; (b) the entrepreneurs’ social, moral, and educational background; (c) information about their particular social project; (d) a question about any critical incident that inspired their work (e); questions concerning their prior work or volunteer experience in the social issue market; (f) questions about their social network that enabled them to start their social venture; and (g) prior entrepreneurship experience. Interviews occurred either face to face or via telephone, depending upon availability and location of interviewees and lasted between 30 to 150 min. A research assistant conducted and recorded each of the interviews.

Social Entrepreneurship Projects

In total, 34 social ventures were founded by 20 participants. Three social ventures were boundary-blurring organizations that were set up as for-profit organizations but had the goal of social good (i.e., focusing on technology and capacity building for nonprofits). Three additional projects occurred outside of the United States. The remaining 28 social ventures were either grassroots organizations for which no legal paperwork was created, in the process of filing for 501c3 status,¹ or nonprofits. Social issues which these nonprofits engaged in included education (7), disabilities (3), local/organic foods (3), racial integration (2), community media and arts (2), urban planning (2), environmental conservation (2), religious (2), neighborhood organization (2), socially beneficial international travel (1), entrepreneur education (1), supporting the armed forces (1), supporting mothers (1), health care reform (1), and nonprofit capacity building (4).

Analysis

The transcripts from the interviews were managed using Atlas.ti, implementing a grounded theory approach (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) to analysis. First, both a research assistant and the authors used open coding. Coders met and compared their codes and developed a working schema, modifying and refining the categories based on subsequent review (Goetz & LeCompte, 1984). Sensitizing concepts (Van den Hoonaard, 1997) provided general reference points and “directions along which to look” (Blumer, 1969, p. 148). During this phase of the analysis, key concepts regarding family legacy, past experiences, and education were identified. Once the key concepts were defined, axial coding was used to compare the content of the codes, and two paths to social entrepreneurship emerged: the activist path and the business path. Negative instances that did not fit within the initial constructs were used to expand, restrict, and adapt the categories. The results reported here relate only to the antecedents to forming the social venture. All names given in this report are pseudonyms.

Findings and Discussion

Extrapolating from a comparison of the 20 social entrepreneurs’ paths to forming their social venture, two paths to social entrepreneurship emerged from the data: the business path and the activist path. In the sample of 20 social entrepreneurs, 11 followed the activist path and 9 followed the business path. The terms activist-types and business-types emerged in vivo from the coding. The key distinguishing feature of the paths is whether the entrepreneur volunteered in an organization focused on the social issue they founded their social venture to address. For activist social entrepreneurs, founding the organization was a continuation of ongoing work to address a social issue. For business social entrepreneurs, the founding of their venture represented their first activity intended to address the social issue. In line with evolutionary theory (Shane, 2000), activist social entrepreneurs encountered different information about how to form a social venture than business social entrepreneurs because of their different socialization.

The differences between activist and business social entrepreneurs may imply different types of identity transformations. Based upon theory and research about role transitions (Ashforth & Saks, 1995; Nicholson, 1984), activist and business social entrepreneurs may align their personal and role identities differently. Both types of social entrepreneurs have a high degree of role discretion, making role development a key aspect of this synchronization. However, depending on the degree to which entering a new social field (e.g., poverty-alleviation, environmental conservation) departs from previous experience, social entrepreneurs may undergo somewhat different personal identity development, defined as the process by which “change is absorbed through the person, altering his or her frame of reference, values, or other identity related attributes” (Nicholson, 1984, p. 175).

Commonalities in the Activist and Business Paths

The commonalities in the activist and business paths describe information that was communicated to both types of social entrepreneurs and incorporated into personal identity and/or role identity. In particular, family legacy or early adulthood experience provided important values that inspired the social entrepreneur to form social ventures late in life. In addition, prior work experience provided models of how to organize their social venture and tacit knowledge about how to overcome obstacles.

Family legacy or transformative early adulthood experience

Eighteen of the 20 social entrepreneurs interviewed suggested that their family was either involved in public service or volunteering to a significant extent. The remaining two social entrepreneurs pointed to a significant event in their early adulthood that triggered a major change in the trajectory of their life. Both experiences involved exposure to circumstances (i.e., visiting developing countries, living in the inner city) that significantly differed from those they were familiar with growing up. In both these cases, in contrast to the social entrepreneurs influenced by family legacy, their experience directly informed the type of social venture they formed.

However, for the vast majority of business and activist social entrepreneurs, family legacy played an important role in motivating them to start their social venture. Fourteen of the 18 participants whose family was either involved in public service or volunteering to a significant extent explicitly referenced a family member’s volunteerism or commitment to a particular social issue as key to explaining their social entrepreneurism. The remaining four described significant parental volunteer commitments, but did not directly attribute that volunteer activity to their social entrepreneurship. Consistent with Roberts’s (1991) high technology entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs in this study did not found social ventures that were in the same social issue industry as their parents. Instead, social entrepreneurs were motivated by the altruistic spirit of parents and grandparents. Leslie, an activist social entrepreneur who had formed several social ventures, noted,

My parents and my greater family have always been really great role models and very encouraging to us . . . My grandmother is probably the best example. They had I think it was 13 foster children . . . and she still has pictures out today of those foster kids.

In addition, social entrepreneurs were motivated by the parent’s commitment to a particular social issue that was evidenced by early conversations. Similar to results from Mair and Noboa (2006), social entrepreneurs suggested that early cognitive and emotional empathy developed through these early conversations with family members set these social issues apart. According to VAS, these early conversations prime individuals to see opportunities that others do not (Myers et al., 2011). For example, Patricia, an activist social entrepreneur who set up a program to read to children in Head Start, described the role of her parents in motivating her to begin the program:

I know that education was a very, very strong value . . . I was a first generation American. My father was forced to drop out of high school and work. My mother got a college degree . . . She really believed in education, and he did, too . . . Perhaps that’s what influenced me most.

Participants’ descriptions of family legacy represented sense making (Weick, 1995) in that they used outcomes, in this case founding a social venture, to contextualize previous family experiences. These early experiences provided common information about why one would want to form a social venture (RQ1). In this way, early socialization was common across social entrepreneur types.

The role of organizational experience

Both business and activist social entrepreneurs suggested that past work experience played a valuable role in overcoming obstacles in founding their social ventures. In particular, past volunteer and paid work experience provided important skills needed for fundraising, a frequently cited obstacle. Angie discussed the skills she developed in Junior League, a women’s volunteer and training organization, as key to developing her organization.

I was in Junior League for 10 years and . . . my active involvement with that was always a fundraising committee. I was either asking for the money or putting together the events to raise the actual money . . . it doesn’t hurt my feelings for somebody to tell me no. It may be hard for them to tell me no but . . . I take nothing away from that experience except that they’re not able to at this point.

Finally, both business and activist social entrepreneurs had previously started either social ventures or businesses. Nine of the social entrepreneurs had started a social venture before their present social ventures and seven had started a small business or worked as an independent contractor. Some participants went on to describe themselves as serial entrepreneurs. Prior entrepreneurial experience, whether successful or not, provided valuable lessons for social entrepreneurs about how to set up an organization. Eric, a business serial-social entrepreneur, described how starting a small business helped him start his social venture, a program that throws baby showers for military wives whose husbands are deployed:

Starting a company definitely helps. Because starting a company is very similar to starting a non-profit. I mean, they’re exactly the same. You have to have your paperwork. You have to file your taxes. You have to lay the foundation.

These findings provide support for extending VAS to secondary careers and entrepreneurship. Although researchers have noted that early part-time work experiences influence career expectations (Jablin, 2001; Myers et al., 2011), findings here particularly point to prior organizational experience being an influence on the decision to found a social venture. In particular, this research suggests that prior career experiences provide useful information about appropriate organizational models and how to perform various managerial activities.

Critical moments and opportunities

Activist and business social entrepreneurs’ immediate impetus for starting the social venture differed, but only in degree. Activist social entrepreneurs described a critical moment as a result of their ongoing volunteerism and/or social engagement that led them to begin the social venture, highlighting the powerfulness of episodic moments in social life (Giddens, 1984). For example, Angie, an activist social entrepreneur whose daughter, Lilly, has Down syndrome, explained how she knew she was to start the universal access play center this way:

I know exactly when it happened. For the past 11 years I have always plunged for the Special Olympics, what they call their Polar Plunge across the country . . . We had raised over $20,000 and I was standing just watching them run in the water and run out . . . I knew in that instant, and, you know what, everybody talks about that moment but it did. It was like everything got very quiet . . . It was the weirdest moment of my life and I went, this is why it’s me . . . If I can get those 80 kids to have this much fun, to love this girl this much, I can introduce this entire community to this community that I now know because of her.

The descriptions of critical moments from activist social entrepreneurs were dramatic, filled with details, conveying their importance. The critical moment created a disjuncture from an already existing set of activities designed to affect the social issue. In contrast, business social entrepreneurs described opportunities, but not critical moments linked with their ongoing work in a social issue.

The immediate catalyst for the formation of a social venture for business social entrepreneurs was often an opportunity that allowed them to fulfill a latent desire to act on a social passion. Allison, a business social entrepreneur who formed an education nonprofit, described the opportunity that propelled her and her husband to form their foundation.

My husband sold his business about a year and three months ago, and from the time he knew he was going to sell it to when he did, we both knew that we wanted to help kids, but we didn’t know exactly how we wanted to go about doing that.

For Allison and her husband, the opportunity that arose was the sale of a business. In contrast to the rich detail of the activist critical moments, business social entrepreneurs talked about the opportunity that came with inheriting some money, or a life change that gave them the opportunity to consider what was next in their lives. These opportunities often led to dramatic career changes into a field where they had little experience.

Distinguishing Features of the Business and Activist Paths

The primary feature that distinguished the activist path from the business path was that the founding of a social venture was a continuation of their ongoing work addressing a social issue. Related to this continuation, activist entrepreneurs noted that prior volunteerism provided important knowledge and resources as they formed their venture.

The importance of volunteerism

Activist social entrepreneurs contended that lessons learned while volunteering in the sector were most instrumental in founding their social venture. Rhonda, an activist social entrepreneur, when asked what advice she would give to other social entrepreneurs put it this way:

Join other people first . . . <When you volunteer> you find out, what are the weaknesses, what are the strengths . . . I improved on the weaknesses and I carried on the strengths. That makes a better organization in the future . . . It worked with me, because I’ve seen so many people . . . who want to be bossy. You can do that when you run your company but not with the NGO. An NGO requires more than that. It’s not about money, no, because to get the people to work for you for free, it’s something else . . . This one, you get the people motivated emotionally. That is a very hard challenge.

Volunteer experience provided a unique socialization experience for social entrepreneurs, one in which they gained unique information (Shane, 2000). In contrast, business social entrepreneurs had little volunteer experience. Tracey, a business social entrepreneur, described it this way: “I was never a big volunteer. I guess I volunteered a little bit or I did small projects but that wasn’t a big part of my background.” As such, business entrepreneurs were not exposed to the information (Shane, 2000) about the inner working of other organizations already addressing their social issue through volunteer experience, but rather sought information through education.

The Importance of a Formal Education

Business path social entrepreneurs pointed to education as the most important resource in forming their social venture. This included management training, a Master’s in Business Administration (MBA), and/or a professional law degree (i.e., Juris Doctor). Although activist social entrepreneurs had similar advanced degrees, business social entrepreneurs placed more value on their education when describing the necessary background for their success. James, a business social entrepreneur, suggested that rather than learning by working in the sector first, he went to school specifically to gain the knowledge he would need to run his social venture.

That’s really why I went to school. I went to law school . . . to specifically study the rules of non-profit organizations, and what is allowable in terms of earned revenue . . . and then went to business school just to get the bricks and mortar entrepreneurial skills to build organizations, run the accounting books, do the entrepreneurial thing.

In sum, although activist social entrepreneurs often had similar advanced degrees, business social entrepreneurs emphasized the importance of an education in the formation of their social ventures to a greater extent.

The Social Ventures Started by Activist and Business Path Social Entrepreneurs

Social entrepreneurs have high role discretion. Individuals with high role discretion tend to focus on role development in their alignment of their personal and role identities (Ashforth & Saks, 1995; Nicholson, 1984). The unique consequence of this role development in this research was the founding of different types of social ventures.

Activist and business social entrepreneurs engaged in different modes of personal and role identity adjustment. Although both included high role development, activist social entrepreneurs engaged in the process of determination (Ashforth & Saks, 1995; Nicholson, 1984). Determination occurs when the person engages in high role development and low personal identity development. The result of determination was that activist social entrepreneurs started more social ventures (n = 23; M = 2.09) than business social entrepreneurs did (n = 11; M = 1.22). Activists’ narratives flowed from one social venture where they volunteered to another where they worked, and then to a social venture they started, without changing any aspect of their personal identity as activists. Drawing from our extension of VAS, activists’ experience in the social market socialized them into a personal identity as an activist. Their formation of a new social venture was consistent with that identity and they drew on models they had seen as part of their extensive experience (Shane, 2000). The primary evidence of this distinction was that the overwhelming majority of social ventures started by activists included significant volunteer involvement. The exceptions were all intermediary social enterprises that served nonprofits and/or government agencies. Social ventures that include volunteers do not solely rely on the typical market-based mechanisms to induce involvement (Cnaan, Handy, & Wadsworth, 1996). As such, the role of the entrepreneur is one that must rely on other modes of inducement to accomplish his or her goals, and knowledge of what communication strategies would work in such circumstances is derived from previous experiences working as a volunteer and/or with other volunteers.

In contrast, business social entrepreneurs’ founding of a social venture marked a new type of action in their lives. They engaged in the process of exploration, where they embarked on a process that includes both high levels of role and personal identity development (Nicholson, 1984). Consistent with previous research, this finding demonstrates that high novelty and high role discretion tend to lead to exploration (Ashforth & Saks, 1995). This process of exploration led them to draw upon both personal experiences with which they were familiar. In general, business social entrepreneurs were more likely to start social ventures that did not require significant volunteer involvement, unless the ventures were explicitly focused on environmental grassroots advocacy. The one exception was a nonprofit dedicated to reading to children. Furthermore, about half of the business social entrepreneurs formed foundations, a particular type of social venture focused on grant-making rather than operations to affect a social issue. Both types of actions align more closely with for-profit models of organizing, suggesting that the business social entrepreneurs drew from the models with which they were most familiar based upon their prior VAS.

Future Research

This research takes a qualitative approach to understanding the antecedents to social entrepreneurship. The purpose of the research was to develop new concepts, not to test an a priori model. From these results, two important areas for future research were identified.

First, this research found that there are two paths that social entrepreneurs take to founding their organizations: the activist path and the business path. Future research would do well to further identify other characteristics that lead individuals to take these two paths.

Second, although this research examined these two paths to social entrepreneurship, it does not suggest which path is more likely to lead to successful social ventures. Evolutionary theory contends that organizing is path-dependent (McKelvey, 1982). This means that all organizing is dependent upon the choices and experiences that came before it in the process of developing the organization. As such, the path to particularly successful, enduring, or innovative social venture may extend back into the entrepreneurial path that led to its founding.

Conclusion

The purpose of this research was to examine the antecedents of social entrepreneurship. It makes two contributions to the social entrepreneurship literature. First, this research uncovers two paths that lead to the founding of social venture: the activist and business paths. Prior research on entrepreneurship does not suggest these alternative paths. Although the extant entrepreneurship literature suggests that prior work in a social industry or market would be predictive of forming a social venture (see Bolton & Thompson, 2004), only the activist path included prior organizational experience in the social market. In contrast, individuals on the business path drew on their education to form their social venture. Because the social venture was not part of their previous stream of activity, business social entrepreneurs were in fact forging a new identity through the process of exploration (Ashforth & Saks, 1995).

Second, differences in information available to social entrepreneurs because of their volunteer experiences in their social market (or lack thereof) led them to form different types of social ventures. Activist social entrepreneurs were much more likely to include volunteers in their business models than business social entrepreneurs. In this regard, our research demonstrates a new consequence of different anticipatory vocational socialization paths, the emergence of different types of organizations.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Maggie Babb for conducting the interviews for this project.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research is supported by a grant from the Academy of Entrepreneurial Leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and by the National Science Foundation (SES-1264417).

Notes

Author Biographies

Michelle Shumate (PhD, University of Southern California) is an associate professor in the School of Communication at Northwestern University, USA. Her main research interests include the dynamics of interorganizational networks and nonprofit organizing.

Yannick Atouba (PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign) is a post-doctoral scholar in organizational studies and network science at the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. His primary research interests include the antecedents, processes, and outcomes of organizational and interorganizational forms, especially in the nonprofit sector.

Katherine R. Cooper (MA, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign) is a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois. Her research interests include interorganizational collaboration and stakeholder representation, particularly in the nonprofit sector.

Andrew Pilny (MA, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign) is a PhD student in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. His main research interests include social movements and organizational networks.

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