Abstract
Social impact is a highly valued concept of social entrepreneurship. However, there is a continuous scholarly debate on what social impact is and how it should be measured. Through a systematic review, we assess the construct clarity of social impact, examining its definitions, scope conditions, semantic relationship to constructs, and coherence. Our findings suggest that social impact lacks construct clarity. Building upon Gallie’s theory of essentially contested concepts, we show that social impact can be regarded as an essentially contested concept and suggest a conceptualization of social impact as a cluster concept. Turning to Mandelbrot’s theory of fractals and the property of multi-similarity, we conjecture that essentially contested concepts further consist of essentially contested sub-components in the field of social entrepreneurship. Drawing on several disciplines, this review resolves existing tensions on the concept of social impact and facilitates future research on assessing social impact
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