The Interplay of Conditions that Affect the Social Entrepreneurs’ Organizational Mission

Abstract

Our research investigates the interplay of the conditions producing either a dominant social, economic, or hybrid mission type. We examine how the mission of 133 (nascent) social entrepreneurs is affected by the interplay of various conditions. The objective of this paper is to accumulate more knowledge about the configuration of conditions associated with a focus on social entrepreneurs’ social, economic, or hybrid mission and to determine whether and how they interact. Our research addresses whether and how personal unmet needs, entrepreneurial experience, social innovation, and attention paid to the social and economic objectives are sufficient to produce entrepreneurial mission types for social enterprises. In doing so, we do not only examine the conditions that converge, but also distinguish between the ways they affect each mission type. We use a configurational approach and a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (FsQca) to explore different combinations of conditions with a dominant focus on the organization’s social, economic, or hybrid mission as an outcome. Our findings show that all the entrepreneurs in our sample were hybrid social entrepreneurs, whose social and economic mission is not a dichotomy, but an interweaving of each other resulting in a blend with different mission nuances, best illustrated by ‘sliders’ that move on the continuum. Based on our findings we developed a typology which shows that the social and economic missions actually work together and that all enterprises are a hybrid form. By linking the various conditions to the social entrepreneurs’ mission, we gained a better understanding of the design features required to organize these different mission types. Our findings are specifically useful for entrepreneurship support by providing insights into the difference in the perceived importance of the organization’s social and economic missions and how different conditions affect the mission subsequently. Moreover, these insights contribute to our understanding of the configurational approach’s merits for social entrepreneurship research.