Using Giddens’s structuration theory and empirical data from a study with social enterprise stakeholders, the article explores how social entrepreneurs and the structure co-create one another. We show that the development of the contemporary significance of social entrepreneurialism lies in a combination of complex context-specific structural forces and the activities of agents who initiate, demand, and impose change. Social entrepreneurs intentionally tackle social challenges, but their actions bring unintentional results, such as the transfer of state responsibilities onto communities. Direct outputs of their activities introduce indirect outcomes, bringing wider changes in culture and policy. The evolving nature of entrepreneurship and a number of factors that interplay in time and space, and enable and constrain social entrepreneurs, confirm the applicability of Giddens’s theory in the field of social entrepreneurship. The originality of this article derives from revealing mechanisms that enable social entrepreneurs to emerge and reasons for structural change. We also build a “co-creation model of structure and agency” that can be used to “engineer” the process of social entrepreneurship.

使用吉登斯的结构理论和来自社会企业利益相关者研究的实证数据，本文探讨了社会企业家和结构如何相互创造。我们表明，社会企业家主义的当代意义的发展在于复杂的特定于环境的结构力量与发起、要求和强加变革的代理人活动的结合。社会企业家有意应对社会挑战，但他们的行为却带来了无意的结果，例如将国家责任转移到社区。他们活动的直接产出引入了间接结果，带来更广泛的文化和政策变化。企业家精神的演进性质和许多在时间和空间上相互作用、促成和约束社会企业家的因素，证实了吉登斯理论在社会企业家领域的适用性。本文的原创性源于揭示社会企业家出现的机制和结构变化的原因。我们还建立了一个“结构和代理的共创模型”，可用于“设计”社会创业的过程。