Social entrepreneurs need resources to develop their organizations and catalyze social impact. Existing research focuses on how social entrepreneurs access and use resources, yet it neglects how they search for resource holders. This issue is particularly salient in social entrepreneurs’ decisions about whom to approach for interpersonal feedback as a valuable resource. The current literature offers lists of individuals whom social entrepreneurs approach for feedback and implies these individuals can be easily accessed. Thus, it offers little insight into how social entrepreneurs select whom to approach for feedback and why, or why they struggle to access feedback. We conducted an in-depth inductive study based on 82 interviews with 36 nascent social entrepreneurs to investigate how they search for and select individuals to approach for feedback within and outside their social networks through an iterative appraisal process. Our findings start to open the black box of searching for resource holders in the resource mobilization process and offer insights on power and stigma in social entrepreneurship.

社会企业家需要资源来发展他们的组织并促进社会影响。现有的研究侧重于社会企业家如何获取和使用资源，而忽略了他们如何寻找资源持有者。这个问题在社会企业家决定向谁寻求人际反馈作为宝贵资源时尤为突出。当前的文献提供了社会企业家寻求反馈的个人名单，并暗示这些人可以很容易地获得。因此，它几乎没有提供关于社会企业家如何选择向谁寻求反馈以及为什么或为什么他们难以获得反馈的见解。我们基于对 36 位新生社会企业家的 82 次访谈进行了深入的归纳研究，以调查他们如何通过迭代评估过程搜索和选择个人以获取其社交网络内外的反馈。我们的研究结果开始打开在资源动员过程中寻找资源持有者的黑匣子，并为社会创业中的权力和污名提供见解。