Social Business: A New Chapter of Hybrid Business Toward Sustainable Development

Arifur Rahman () and Naznin Sultana ()
Additional contact information
Arifur Rahman: Latrobe Business School, La Trobe University
Naznin Sultana: University of Dhaka

A chapter in The Palgrave Handbook of Corporate Social Responsibility, 2021, pp 637-666 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The concept of social business emerged in 2006 as a hybrid business model in response to the failure of government sector and philanthropic efforts to provide sustainable solutions to social and environmental problems. Social business is a cause-driven or social objective-driven business model that intends to harness the business principle and philanthropic motive together to achieve positive social change in a productive and commercially viable way. It is a business in every sense with the replacement of economic profit maximization goal with that of social benefit maximization. Theoretically, social business is assumed of being capable to resolve almost all sort of social problems including poverty, unemployment, environmental degradation, and health and sanitation problems by means of balanced allocation of scarce resources, thereby can help achieve sustainable development goals (SDGs). Thus, it seems apparent that the concept of social business and sustainable development is closely intertwined and the functions of social business encompass the agenda of social and environmental sustainability. Yet, social business is not meant to alter capitalism; instead, it tends to offer “enlightened capitalism” to cure the flaws of the free market system. However, as a relatively new mechanism, social business suffers from several limitations and encounters numerous challenges. Replication and scaling up successful ventures are required for this concept to advance magnificently and to serve the planet and the people effectively.

Keywords: Social business; Hybrid business model; Sustainable development; Enlightened capitalism; Profit maximizing business (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:sprchp:978-3-030-42465-7_47

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783030424657

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-42465-7_47

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().