Abstract
Enabling resources are the array of tangible and intangible assets that social entrepreneurs mobilize or create to bring forward novel place-based initiatives, to respond to unmet sustainability challenges and ideally contribute to virtuous processes of socio-economic transformation. Understanding the role of resources in constraining or enabling the development of social enterprises holds important implications not merely for the initiatives, but also for the places where they are embedded. Existing studies fail to provide a comprehensive, empirically grounded account of resources for place-based social entrepreneurship. This paper aims to fill this gap, by exploring the array of resources that enable and constrain the development of Green Care practice, i.e., nature-based activities with a social innovation purpose. Three communities of Finnish practitioners—a nature-tourism company, a care farm, and a biodynamic farm—were involved over the span of 3 years in research activities conducted with an in-depth qualitative approach. Participants were engaged in several stages of iterative learning combining conventional and action-research methods: semi-structured interviews, participatory mapping, and a co-creation workshop. Results show that entrepreneurs resort to a great variety of enabling resources, inclusive of both tangible and intangible assets, that are only marginally considered by relevant literature. Based on these findings, the paper proposes a novel set of enabling resources, comprehensive of nine clusters: infrastructural, institutional, material, place-specific, organizational culture-related, social, ethical, affective, and competence-related. Two concluding insights can be inferred: understanding resources is paramount to grasp possibilities and challenges of place-based entrepreneurship; in-depth participatory processes are needed for a thorough and grounded investigation of enabling resources in places.
Highlights
The study of social entrepreneurship has received increasing scholarly attention over the last couple of decades
Sustainability Science (2020) 15:437–453 account the ecosystem boundaries in which they operate (Schaefer et al 2015). To contribute to this aim, this paper explores the role of resources in enabling and constraining place-based social entrepreneurship
This paper focuses on three specific empirical cases, namely a nature-tourism company, a biodynamic farm, and an ecological sheep and care farm, which are taken as case studies
Summary
The study of social entrepreneurship has received increasing scholarly attention over the last couple of decades. A special attention was given to studies of social and sustainability entrepreneurship These references give account of the embedded, contextualized, and place-based nature of entrepreneurial practices such as Green Care. Skills (and competences) are definitely predominant in the studies considered, and social skills in particular Among the latter, crucial to the entrepreneurial process seem to be rhetorical skills, such as sense making and inspirational discourse—the capacity to build a desired collective scenario based on a common vision (Antadze and McGowan 2017; Battilana et al 2009; Emirbayer and Mische 1998; Pyysiäinen 2011). In the empirical phase, the following sets of resources were broadly taken into account as analytical lenses: (a) personal attributes, comprehensive of various skills (social, cultural, political, management), ethical resources, and affective resources; (b) structural conditions, including institutional, cognitive, and material resources. Capital including structural (e.g., access to resources), relational (including values), cognitive (e.g., shared norms); embeddedness; ethical motives and moral responsibility
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