Social Entrepreneurship and Social Entrepreneurs: The Influence of Cultural Context

Abstract

The current growth of the social sector is undeniable. Just as the business sectors have experienced a great increase in productivity over the past century, the citizen sector is experiencing a similar transformation, with the number and sophistication of citizen organizations increasing radically. In this sense, the social entrepreneurship topic has aroused great interest in recent years and has developed into a cultural, economic and social phenomenon. This chapter analyzes the influence of cultural context on the emergence of social entrepreneurship and on the characteristics of social entrepreneurs. To test this influence, we rely on the Eurobarometer Entrepreneurship in the EU and Beyond to compare two different cultural contexts: the Latin European context and the Northern European context. On one hand, the main findings suggest that cultural context has a significant influence on the rate of social entrepreneurship. On the other hand, the results highlight that constituent variables, such as age, location, risk aversion and the capacity to respond to the opportunities in the environment, have a cultural bias.