This chapter presents an in-depth examination and analysis of published literature indexed in Scopus database on social entrepreneurship, sustainability, and value creation. A descriptive bibliometric analysis coupled with content analysis is presented incorporating citations included in Scopus' multi-disciplinary database over the last 20 years. Two software packages, VOS Viewer and Bibliometrix R, were employed to probe the research questions and create visualizations of the bibliometric networks. The interconnected and multifaceted nature of the research field is demonstrated, thematic evolution is illustrated, and emerging clusters are identified. Findings suggest that the research on social entrepreneurship, sustainability, and value creation has been pioneered by USA followed by India and other countries. Also, further steps need to be undertaken to encourage and enable cross-border international collaboration to draw learning together from different national and regional contexts.
Top1. Introduction
There has been significant growth in academic interest in sustainable development, with researchers trying to approach this through several contexts (Anand et al., 2021). Along this course, a nexus of social entrepreneurship and sustainable development has inevitably been created (Alberti and Varon Garrido, 2017). The nexus indicates that many entrepreneurs strongly recognize themselves as change agents for accomplishing systematic solutions to environmental and social issues (Žalėnienė and Pereira, 2021), whilst not forgoing their own survival and sustainability future (Bansal, Garg and Sharma, 2019). This concept of social entrepreneurship has hence been recognized for its potential to facilitate value creation and economic development (Baima et al., 2020).
Sustainable development through social entrepreneurship has received enormous attention that encompasses economic, environmental, and social concerns (Belz and Binder, 2017), and entrepreneurial knowledge and the innovation capabilities associated with it are instrumental in harnessing opportunities for sustainable development (Belz and Binder, 2017). Social entrepreneurs have, thus, been referred to as ‘engines of sustainable development’ (Angelidou and Psaltoglou, 2017). There have been a vast number of studies which have determined the goals and boundaries of social entrepreneurship (Monroe-White and Zook, 2018). In addition, the overall understanding of social entrepreneurship, value creation, and sustainability has been improved by integrating previously existing theories (Nasra and Dacin, 2010). However, the various manifestations of social entrepreneurship need to be assessed based on firm theoretical grounds (Choi and Majumdar, 2014). Hence, to ensure that this field does not fragment further and to support an organized generation of further knowledge, it is necessary to understand the structure and extent to which this field has been probed. To address this, an evidence-based roadmap, developed by adopting a bibliometric study method, is pursued, examining current literature and mapping the evolution of this topic is provided here/ This roadmap will facilitate this field's further movement forward. This study, therefore, probes into these research questions:
This study, therefore, seeks to contribute to theory in the following ways. Firstly, systematic insights into the evolution of Social Entrepreneurship, Sustainability, and Value Creation in the last 20 years are illustrated to provide a comprehensive overview of this field. Secondly, the interconnected and multifaceted nature of the research field is demonstrated, and emerging trends and thematic areas are identified, which are used to identify further research directions. Following this introduction, this chapter is structured as follows: Section 2 elucidates the research methodology adopted and the research questions probed. In Section 3, the findings are illustrated and summarized. Section 4 covers this analysis's contributions, limitations, and conclusion.
Top2. Research Methodology
This section explains the process adopted to conduct the bibliometric study of the scientific coverage on Social Entrepreneurship, Sustainability, and Value Creation indexed in the Scopus database. The initial task was to recognize the most appropriate database (Albort-Morant and Ribeiro-Soriano, 2016). We chose the Scopus database for the following reasons: Firstly, the Scopus database possesses greater coverage of journals and articles compared to others – including the Web of Science (Archambault and Campbell, 2013). Secondly, Scopus provides a comprehensive overview of global research output and enables generation of bibliographical interests amongst researchers (Durán-Sánchez et al., 2019)
Figure 1. Research framework of this study