The Role of Socio-political Perception in Defining Social Entrepreneurship as a Career

Abstract

Social entrepreneurs innovate and provide solutions like entrepreneurs, but they also focus on social transformation like activists. Previous literature highlighted the need to identify characteristics that differentiate between social entrepreneurs and other similar careers. I hypothesize that social dominance orientation and perceived permeability of social status are factors that differentiate social entrepreneurs from the other two careers,. After collecting data from more than 100 individuals, I show that social entrepreneurs prefer to adopt egalitarian perspective significantly more than entrepreneurs and they prefer to adopt social mobility strategies significantly more than activist. The study contributes to the literature of Social Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship, Activism, Social dominance theory and Social identity theory.