ABSTRACT

Entrepreneurship research views context as central to understanding entrepreneurship as a fluid social construction. Our study answers recent call to focus on a diversity of organizational forms to deepen theorizing and to broaden the domain of what is considered entrepreneurship. Worker cooperatives are a type of social enterprise under exposed in the entrepreneurship literature. Thus, we investigate how context impacts collective social entrepreneurial processes over time by exploring how worker cooperative entrepreneurs view their contexts and their own entrepreneurial initiatives’ purposes. We introduce the term ‘participative social entrepreneurship’, which we define as ‘democratic and collaborative action, amongst both similar and diverse actors to foster positive societal change’. Findings based on a longitudinal study of worker cooperative entrepreneurs from two European territories over 2011-2020 highlight the relevance of context and purpose interplay in shaping worker cooperative entrepreneurs’ perceptions and so, the construction of participative social entrepreneurship. The study reveals that while, in theory, the worker cooperative form has a prosocial purpose naturally embedded in its democratic governance structure, social entrepreneurship in action does not always translate into voices that contest the status quo and highlights the necessity of paying attention to the factors that make participative social entrepreneurship dynamic and real.

摘要

创业研究将背景视为将创业理解为一种流动的社会建构的核心。我们的研究回应了最近的呼吁，即关注组织形式的多样性，以深化理论化并拓宽被认为是企业家精神的领域。工人合作社是一种在创业文献中曝光不足的社会企业。因此，我们通过探索工人合作企业家如何看待他们的环境和他们自己的创业计划的目的来调查环境如何随着时间的推移影响集体社会创业过程。我们引入了“参与式社会企业家精神”一词，我们将其定义为“在相似和不同的参与者之间开展的民主和协作行动，以促进积极的社会变革”。基于对 2011-2020 年两个欧洲领土的工人合作企业家的纵向研究，结果突出了背景和目的相互作用在塑造工人合作企业家的观念以及参与式社会企业家精神的构建方面的相关性。研究表明，虽然从理论上讲，工人合作形式在其民主治理结构中自然嵌入了亲社会目的，但在行动中的社会企业家精神并不总是转化为挑战现状的声音，并强调关注因素的必要性使参与式社会企业家精神充满活力和真实。