Research Information System
5th Bilsel International Ephesus Scientific Research and Innovation Congress Turkey, İzmir, Turkey,, 26 - 27 October 2024, pp.444-454, (Full Text)
Social entrepreneurship has been an increasingly substantial area of practice to address challenging social sustainability problems. Social entrepreneurs might have commitment, motivation, purpose, and ambition to tackle social challenges they care for. However, social entrepreneurs also need dynamic capabilities to make sense of their environmental factors, to gain people and resources to their goals, and to integrate resources into solutions through innovative modalities. The dynamic capabilities approach is usually employed to analyze the skills and knowledge sets of for-profit entrepreneurs in their efforts to survive and grow amidst rapidly changing customer demands, market conditions, and technological shifts. On the other hand, the question of how the relevant dynamic capabilities might differ for social entrepreneurs is rarely examined. Dynamic capabilities of analytical thinking, sense-making, resource integration, and resource coordination are central to the extant literature. However, we argue that for a social entrepreneur, being able to critically understand their institutional context and strategize using the factors of the institutional environment are indispensable parts of dynamic capabilities. Additionally, marketing plays a crucial role in social entrepreneurship by helping social entrepreneurs effectively communicate their mission, engage with stakeholders, and build trust. Social entrepreneurship marketing serves as a bridge that aligns social value creation with stakeholder needs, enabling social entrepreneurs to strategically position their ventures within competitive and resource-constrained environments. To develop our conceptual approach, we employ the institutional entrepreneurship perspective from new institutional theory. Institutional entrepreneurship can be defined by the purposeful, reflexive, and critical practices of individuals to work with, work through, and work against their institutional context to initiate change in institutional structures. In the case of social entrepreneurship, we develop our approach at the individual level to propose dynamic capabilities that make sense of social problems, their political, economic, and/or sociocultural contexts, and leverage the opportunities and resources emanating from the institutional context surrounding the respective social problem.
Keywords: Dynamic Capabilities, Social Entrepreneurship Marketing, Social Entrepreneurship, New Institutional Theory, Institutional Entrepreneurship