A Review of the Status of Social Entrepreneurship Research and Education in Iran

Abstract

Despite its long history, social entrepreneurship research and education are not old topics in Iran. In fact, the history mainly goes back to the establishment of the Faculty of Entrepreneurship in the University of Tehran. On the one hand, more generally, the roadmap of research on social entrepreneurship still remains controversial, and fragmented efforts are made and continued to investigate this topic in Iran. On the other hand, social entrepreneurship education was mostly developed based on the topics covered by the curriculum which was designed by the faculty members of the Faculty of Entrepreneurship. Incremental improvements, however, are considered. Thus, the present chapter tried to shed light on social entrepreneurship research and education in Iran. To do so, the main Persian databases for papers (Magiran, SID, and Noormags) and theses (IranDoc, and the Library of the University of Tehran) were selected and searched accordingly. In addition to this, research works indexed in Google scholar, Thomson Reuters and Scopus databases were added. Then, the research works were categorized based on their publication date. Finally, the trend and a classified view of the status quo were presented. Secondly, in order to elaborate on the status of social entrepreneurship education in the country, the evidence from those research works was added to the national reports, and thus an integrated view was offered. In conclusion, the chapter concluded with some remarks on the improvement of the research roadmap and education on social entrepreneurship in Iran, as well as some directions for future research.