Reducing inequality in communities through social entrepreneurship

Abstract

Equitable distribution of all of society’s benefits and costs is a key dimension of community resilience. Yet in contemporary urban developed economies, a multitude of inequalities can be observed which are often geographically concentrated in deprived urban communities. Our paper asks, how do social enterprises create positive social change and reduce inequality in deprived urban communities? This is an important question as there is little theorizing on how social enterprises create social impact at a community level. We extend the MCO (motivation, capability, opportunity) framework by Stephan et al. (2016) to understand how social enterprises use these three mechanisms for change in the community context. We collected data from 12 social enterprises in deprived areas of London and Birmingham in the UK using semi-structured interviews. By analysing the social enterprises’ theories of change and the mechanisms they employ to illicit positive social change in their communities we discovered three pillars for creating community-level change: individual behavioural change, adaptive problem solving and establishing community cohesion. We find that social enterprises that use all three pillars provide holistic solutions to complex problems they encounter in their communities and demonstrate that social change is achieved when individual- and system-level changes are targeted simultaneously.