Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of photos
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Section I Social entrepreneurship
- Section 2 The dynamics of social change
- Section 3 Social capital built by social entrepreneurs
- Section 4 A new kind of leadership
- Epilogue The Past and the Future
- Conclusion
- Appendix 1 Becoming a Social Entrepreneur
- Appendix 2 The Process of Assessing Candidates for a Fellowship
- Appendix 3 Excerpts from Interviews
- References
- Index
Epilogue - The Past and the Future
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of photos
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Section I Social entrepreneurship
- Section 2 The dynamics of social change
- Section 3 Social capital built by social entrepreneurs
- Section 4 A new kind of leadership
- Epilogue The Past and the Future
- Conclusion
- Appendix 1 Becoming a Social Entrepreneur
- Appendix 2 The Process of Assessing Candidates for a Fellowship
- Appendix 3 Excerpts from Interviews
- References
- Index
Summary
We have so far been looking at social entrepreneurship through the lenses of the social processes they facilitate. First, some theories of social change were presented, followed by a discussion of social complexity and how new emerging social qualities become irreversible; we also introduced the concept of social capital as a pivotal mechanism used by social entrepreneurs for empowering groups and societies. Next, we focused on the transformative power of social networks and how they can be fertile ground for building social capital. We also explored how personality traits strengthen the potential for building social capital. In Section 4, we delineated our understanding of the phenomenon of social entrepreneurship and the new kind of leadership it represents. In short, we pointed out that social entrepreneurs initiate and manage the process of emergence. They create an enabling environment for launching one's own bottom-up social networks; they provide the opportunity for social coordination, so that the networks operate in a cohesive way, leading to emergent occurrences. They change the properties of the social system by modifying such parameters as trust and the propensity for cooperation, attributes that build social capital. Finally, we illustrated how social entrepreneurs – in keeping with our definition – address insurmountable, intractable social problems.
This is, of course, far from a definitive exploration of social entrepreneurship – a vast open space still remains to be studied. The following case studies featuring the work of other social entrepreneurs not examined in the body of this text provide an opportunity to suggest possible directions of further study.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Social EntrepreneurshipTheory and Practice, pp. 169 - 186Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011