How tax incentives slow down positive change in social impact ecosystems and what can we do about it

How impact investing firms are responding to sustain and grow social economy enterprises in light of the COVID-19 pandemic

“…We find that, unlike their regular nonfinancial work, impact investors’ pandemic-focused nonfinancial work is not typically limited to technical assistance offerings. Instead, a major focus of their pandemic-focused nonfinancial work remains on ecosystem building activity ( Gamble and Muñoz, 2021 ; Islam, 2020b ) that involves undertaking intelligence, coalition, and advocacy work targeting both portfolio and nonportfolio social economy enterprises, their beneficiaries, and other impact investors. This observation is true for both impact-first (e.g., DOEN Foundation seeks below-market-rate returns) and finance-first (e.g., MicroVest Capital seeks risk-adjusted market-rate returns) impact investing firms.…”

Advancing a Contextualized, Community-Centric Understanding of Social Entrepreneurial Ecosystems

“…Before proceeding further, we elaborate on a recent, growing literature strand focused on social impact (Barki et al, 2020; Gamble & Muñoz, 2021; Han & Shah, 2020; Roundy & Lyons, 2021; Thompson et al, 2018). These “social impact entrepreneurial ecosystems (SIEEs) are a subtype of entrepreneurial ecosystem” (Roundy & Lyons, 2021, p. 1).…”

The magical language of un-realistic venture ideas in social entrepreneurship

“…Consequently, business plans both codify and perform speech acts by affecting readers through the intertextual readings, revisions, and reproductions of their content (Montesano Montessori 2016). They are documents of deliberation as well as the price of admission for entering business plan competitions (Stephan, Patterson, and Kelly 2015;Gamble and Muñoz 2021). Consequently, social business plans represent both artefacts of desired change as well as artefacts of cultural context, and like a sermon, political speech, or any other linguistic rallying cry for a new reality, they can be linguistically analysed for implicit nuances and contextual insights.…”

“…To make sense of our findings, we leverage magical realism, a fictional genre that rose to prominence in mid-century Latin America as the literary arm of social movements protesting cultural and economic colonialism (Zamora and Faris 1995;Ahmad, Afsar, and Masood 2012;Angulo 2018). Magical realism uses hybrid narratives of fantastical characters and events intertwined with conventional landscapes (Ganzin, Islam, and Suddaby 2020) to confuse readers' taken-for-granted reality, critique social injustices, and manifest social transformation (Flores 1955). Its hybridity of real and extra-real possibilities resembles the un-realistic venture ideas social entrepreneurs construct in their pitches for social change.…”