Social Bricolage: Theorizing Social Value Creation in Social Enterprises

Abstract

Current theorizations of bricolage in entrepreneurship studies require refinement and development to be used as a theoretical framework for social entrepreneurship. Our analysis traces bricolage's conceptual underpinnings from various disciplines, identifying its key constructs as making do, a refusal to be constrained by limitations, and improvisation. Although these characteristics appear to epitomize the process of creating social enterprises, our research identifies three further constructs associated with social entrepreneurship: social value creation, stakeholder participation, and persuasion. Using data from a qualitative study of eight U.K. social enterprises, we apply the bricolage concept to social entrepreneurial action and propose an extended theoretical framework of social bricolage.

Sustainable Entrepreneurship: The Role of Perceived Barriers and Risk

“…Indeed, protecting the natural environment concerns a nonexcludable public good, resulting in low potential for value capture. On the other hand, serving unmet social needs, such as providing sanitation to slum areas and revitalizing deprived communities, clearly limits the capacity in value capture because beneficiaries tend to lack the means to pay for the value creation (DiDomenico et al 2010;Mair and Martí 2006). In both cases, operating under circumstances of imperfect markets poses additional challenges that need to be overcome by sustainable entrepreneurs at the inception and more established stages of their business.…”

“…For example, a large-scale UK survey by the Social Enterprise Coalition shows that access to financing is perceived as a strong barrier to growth among social entrepreneurs (Leahy and Villeneuve-Smith 2009). Several reasons explaining the relative difficulty of obtaining financing that equally relate to the business practice of sustainable entrepreneurs to purposely establish activities in areas with limited value capture potential have been proposed (DiDomenico et al 2010;Mair and Martí 2006)-an issue akin to our market imperfection argument in our subsection ''Challenges to sustainable entrepreneurs''. Although this is a strategic choice made by such entrepreneurs, they have to address other stakeholders in establishing and growing their ventures.…”

Towards a ‘Long View’: Historical Perspectives on the Scaling and Replication of Social Ventures

“…Their efforts to scale social impact may come from the expansion of a social venture's activities, and in finding new ways of combining its resources and capabilities. Previous research has shown that social ventures can assemble a diverse range of resources for growth through informal processes that are sometimes described as 'social' bricolage (Haugh 2007;Smith and Stevens 2010;DiDomenico, Haugh, and Tracey 2010). This theoretical framework, which builds on existing conceptualizations of entrepreneurial bricolage, has been used to examine the micro-processes of value creation in social ventures 9 .…”

Institutional complexity and social entrepreneurship: A fuzzy-set approach

“…Similarly, scholars call for new studies that use large number of cases and more complex research techniques capable of examining which institutions play the most relevant role in the development of social enterprises (Estrin et al, 2013;Short et al, 2009). This study aims to contribute to current knowledge by conducting a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) (Ragin, 2008) of the combined effects of local institutions on social entrepreneurship, which typically reflects a response to unmet needs in a local community (Di Domenico et al, 2010).…”