Mapping Social Entrepreneurship over time. A bibliometric analysis

Objectives Social entrepreneurship (SE) is a phenomenon that has growing impact in the business and has witnessed an emerging interest as research stream. Particularly in the last decade there has been a relevant increase of theoretical and empirical studies. The paper deepens the analysis of this stream of research, drawing on past literature reviews such as Short et al. (2009); Zahra et al. (2009); Dacin et al. (2010). Building on a rich dataset and on longitudinal bibliometric data, the paper traces the development of the debate in the last two decades. Prior work Despite the growing attention on social entrepreneurship, academic literature appeared fragmented (Mort et al., 2003), and this fragmentation is mirrored by the variety of definitions of social entrepreneurship (Dees,2001; Galera & Borzaga,2009). For instance while in Europe, with the exception of the United Kingdom, social enterprise has generally come to mean a social cooperative or association formed to provide employment or specific care services in a participatory framework, in the United States, social entrepreneurship generally embodies any type of non-profit organization involved in earned income generation activities (Kerlin, 2006). Debate is still open and concerns different issues and dimensions that have to be considered in order to define social entrepreneurship. Approach In order to map chronologically the SE research field, the paper adopts a longitudinal approach based on bibliometric data, for the exploration of research field not yet well established. Given that social entrepreneurship is a relatively recent research stream, we conducted our search in ISI Web of Science database, without any time boundary to explore the field since its inception. We collected a sample of 432 articles and 9 books, that exceeds the one (152 articles) recently analysed by Short et al. (2009). We purposively would enrich that relevant analysis in three directions, covering a longer timespan, broadening the scope in term of journals and books and deeping the analysis by looking at the relationships (citations) among key articles . Results The analysis shows the historical evolution of the field, born in 1991. We describe the different stages of the debate development, and by each phase we take into consideration the size and the impact (citations) of key publications, distinguishing theoretical and empirical contributions and highlighting main research topics and their relationship.