Ebbs and Flows of Social Entrepreneurship Research: A Critical Historical Review

The field of social entrepreneurship has emerged over the last thirty years, and yet has remained relatively distinct from nonprofit scholarship. This paper reports the findings of a critical historical review undertaken on the most prominent research on social entrepreneurship that has been undertaken since the topic started to emerge. Bibliometric analysis was employed to identify the most prominent literature in a given period. We synthesize and analyze the research that is characteristic of each period, which allows us to plot the terrain of social entrepreneurship scholarship over time. We focus on how social entrepreneurship research has diverged from its roots in nonprofit studies, discuss the broad trends we reveal through our synthesis of the literature and reflect on where the future of social entrepreneurship, and its relationship with nonprofit scholarship, may diverge or converge in future.