BEYOND THE COMMERCIAL VERSUS SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP DICHOTOMY: A CASE STUDY OF INFORMAL ENTREPRENEURS

Colin Williams and Sara Nadin
Additional contact information
Sara Nadin: Centre for Regional Economic and Enterprise Development (CREED), Management School, University of Sheffield, Mushroom Lane Sheffield, S10 2TN, UK

Journal of Developmental Entrepreneurship (JDE), 2012, vol. 17, issue 03, 1-17

Abstract: Despite a widespread recognition in the mainstream entrepreneurship literature that many legitimate entrepreneurs do not pursue purely profit-driven commercial goals, the small but burgeoning literature on entrepreneurship in the informal economy has assumed entrepreneurs operating wholly or partially on an off-the-books basis are commercial rather than social entrepreneurs. To evaluate critically this assumption, evidence is reported from a survey involving face-to-face interviews with 70 informal entrepreneurs located in deprived and affluent urban and rural English localities. The finding is that informal entrepreneurs range from those pursuing purely commercial ends through to purely social entrepreneurs pursuing solely social logics, with the majority situated somewhere in-between combining both commercial and social objectives. The outcome is a call to recognize that not all informal entrepreneurs are purely commercial entrepreneurs and that the commercial versus social entrepreneurship dichotomy will need to be transcended if the multifarious goals underpinning informal entrepreneurship are to be better understood.

Keywords: Informal sector; underground economy; shadow economy; commercial entrepreneurship; social entrepreneurship; enterprise culture; enterprise development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S1084946712500185
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

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:wsi:jdexxx:v:17:y:2012:i:03:n:s1084946712500185

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

DOI: 10.1142/S1084946712500185

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Developmental Entrepreneurship (JDE) is currently edited by Peter Koveos

More articles in Journal of Developmental Entrepreneurship (JDE) from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().