Introduction to a special issue on soci(et)al entrepreneurship

Towards the end of the 1990s a new buzzword made its entry in the entrepreneurship literature: social entrepreneurship. It seemed that by adding the term “social” to the concept of “entrepreneurship” we came to witness the birth of a new phenomenon and, at the same time, the emergence of a new (sub)field in entrepreneurship studies. However, there is no consensus regarding the definition of the concept of “social entrepreneurship”; the term is used very broadly and there are many competing concepts – “societal entrepreneurship,” “community entrepreneurship,” and “sustainable entrepreneurship” – which enhance the confusion. In their seminal article on this alleged new (sub)field, Mair and Martí (2006) took stock of the myriad of partly converging and partly diverging definitions of the concept of social entrepreneurship that had been produced in only a few years of scholarly writing.