Beyond the “ivory tower”. Comparing academic and non-academic knowledge on social entrepreneurship

Paola Bernardi, Alberto Bertello (), Canio Forliano and Ludovico Bullini Orlandi
Additional contact information
Paola Bernardi: University of Turin
Alberto Bertello: University of Turin
Canio Forliano: University of Palermo
Ludovico Bullini Orlandi: University of Bologna

International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal, 2022, vol. 18, issue 3, No 1, 999-1032

Abstract: Abstract The increasing relevance of societal challenges has recently brought social entrepreneurship to the fore due to its capacity to leverage entrepreneurial processes to achieve social value while ensuring profits. In this study, we apply an experimental research method to analyse the concept of social entrepreneurship comprehensively. More specifically, we develop bibliometric analysis and web crawling techniques to gather information related to social entrepreneurship from Scopus and Wikipedia. We conduct a comparative network analysis of social entrepreneurship’s conceptual structure at academic and non-academic levels. This analysis has been performed considering scientific articles’ keywords and Wikipedia webpages’ co-occurrences, enabling us to identify four different thematic clusters in both cases. Moreover, plotting the centrality and density of each cluster on a bi-dimensional matrix, we have sketched a strategic diagram and provided the thematic evolution of this research topic, based on the level of interaction among clusters, and the degree of cohesion of keywords in each cluster. This paper represents one of the first attempts in the entrepreneurship literature to shed light on the conceptual boundaries of a research topic based on the analysis of both a scientific and an open-source knowledge database. Our results reveal similarities and discrepancies between those two different sources of knowledge, and outline avenues for future studies at the intersection between social entrepreneurship and the research domains of digital transformation, performance measurement, entrepreneurial ecosystems, and ethics. We also call for a further conceptualisation of social entrepreneurship in the face of the increasing complexity that characterises grand challenges.

Keywords: Social entrepreneurship; Grand challenges; Bibliometric analysis; Web crawling; Wikipedia; Network analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11365-021-00783-1 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:intemj:v:18:y:2022:i:3:d:10.1007_s11365-021-00783-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... urship/journal/11365

DOI: 10.1007/s11365-021-00783-1

Access Statistics for this article

International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal is currently edited by Salvador Roig

More articles in International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().