Spurring competitiveness, social and economic performance of family-owned SMEs through social entrepreneurship; a multi-analytical SEM & ANN perspective

Rizwan Ullah Khan, Christopher Richardson and Yashar Salamzadeh

Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2022, vol. 184, issue C

Abstract: Social enterprises have become a nascent concept in academia and have grabbed the attention of research scholars. They are deemed as an important predictor of economic growth, poverty alleviation, and solving social and economic issues. In the COVID-19 pandemic, many developed and developing economies accounted for a negative change in unemployment, health, education, and other social issues. Consequently, researchers realized that social enterprises are an important predictor to overcome many issues during the pandemic. Hence, the current study contributes to the body of knowledge by investigating the influence of social entrepreneurial orientation on social and economic performance through a mediating role of competitive advantage. The data were collected from the top management of family-owned manufacturing firms operating in Pakistan. The current study executed a dual-stage analysis involving Smart-PLS and artificial intelligence (AI) named Artificial Neurons Networks (ANN). The SEM model shows that social entrepreneurial orientation has a negative impact on economic performance (profit maximization) but a positive effect on social performance. ANN architecture explains the 78 % accuracy of the proposed model. Considering the results, we recommend firms emphasize social entrepreneurial orientation to configure their competitive advantage and performance in the pandemic.

Keywords: Social entrepreneurship; Differentiation and cost leadership strategies; Social and financial performance; SEM; Artificial Neurons Networks (ANN) Pakistan (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162522005686
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:tefoso:v:184:y:2022:i:c:s0040162522005686

DOI: 10.1016/j.techfore.2022.122047

Access Statistics for this article

Technological Forecasting and Social Change is currently edited by Fred Phillips

More articles in Technological Forecasting and Social Change from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().