Studying the Origins of Social Entrepreneurship: Compassion and the Role of Embedded Agency

Social entrepreneurship—the process of employing market-based methods to solve social problems—continues to grow in popularity but remains poorly understood. Researchers have justifiably expressed a growing desire to leave behind definitional debates regarding social entrepreneurship and instead focus on its antecedents and consequences. Arend’s (2013) response to our article (Miller, Grimes, McMullen, & Vogus, 2012) furthers this discussion by suggesting that our focus on the motivational origins of social entrepreneurship is misplaced. He outlines two major critiques: (1) compassion is an inappropriate starting point for studying the origins of social entrepreneurship, and (2) social entrepreneurship research should instead focus on “how the social entrepreneur-opportunity nexus evolves” (2013: 4). We address both critiques by highlighting the fact that the social entrepreneur in our model is an embedded agent (Holm, 1995; Seo & Creed, 2002). While societal forces may shape the role of social entrepreneur and the scripts associated with social entrepreneurship, our model recognizes that individuals must be motivated to assume that role. In other words, the process associated with social entrepreneurship is embedded in a matrix of institutions that provides the opportunity for such a process while the individual is, in effect, a configuration of motivations, cognitions, and capital that make up the entrepreneurial agency required to take part in the process. Among the motivations is compassion, which has received considerable attention from social entrepreneurship researchers (e.g., see Dees, 2007). Building on prior theory, our recent work (Miller et al., 2012) specifies the complex set of mechanisms through which compassion encourages the agency required to engage in social entrepreneurship and the conditions that channel this agency toward social entrepreneurship. In clarifying our approach, we offer an agenda for future research that recognizes the need for a more, not less, comprehensive approach essential to understanding a phenomenon as complex as social entrepreneurship. As a result, the proposed path is more consistent with the moral of the elephant and blind men parable often used by critics (Gartner, 2001), as well as advocates (Arend, 2013), of the nexus approach to studying entrepreneurship.