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With current social, environmental and economic challenges, there is an increasing need to encourage more sustainable business models, which include social entrepreneurship, in the education of our future leaders and entrepreneurs. This has resulted in significant research and practice towards improving students' social entrepreneurial intention with higher education programmes. We used survey data collected from 220 university students in Brazil. These students participated in the Enactus programme, which exposed them to social entrepreneurial experience and entrepreneurial education. Our findings highlight the importance of experience-based programmes in forming empathy, essential to self-efficacy development, and in improving the ability to identify social opportunities, which together are indispensable for developing social entrepreneurial intentions. This paper contributes to social entrepreneurship education literature by emphasising the need to integrate experience-based opportunities into higher education programmes. It confirms that social entrepreneurial actions are contextually driven and should be addressed and developed closer to the needs. This results in empathic individuals who can see opportunities others do not see and become social entrepreneurs. In regard to public policy support and the encouragement of social entrepreneurship models, our findings emphasise the need to help universities and encourage experiential programmes to develop students. In this way, universities which develop social entrepreneurship education programmes have the opportunity to act as agents of change, developing human capital to address the social/environmental challenges and create a fairer society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate how social enterprises actively engage with their stakeholders to legitimize their hybrid position in addressing both social and businesses audience. This is particularly important in their effort to capturing stability (expectation to 'fit in') within an emerging field and at the same time to address change and growth (expectation to 'stand out') with their limited resources, in order to be profitable enterprises, while creating social value. We analyze in-depth interviews with senior members of 21 UK-based social enterprises and we find that for many SEs involved in legitimization exercise through the supportive system, collective system and stakeholders' impression. By outlining the integrated framework on stakeholder engagement for hybrid legitimacy, we found that (i) legitimization exercise through collective sharing of SE identity help to build SE image and legitimize SE socially driven mission, while (ii) legitimization through supportive system (resources and business advantage) help building credibility by demonstrating SE capability to grow economically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]