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This qualitative study focuses on the factors that motivate grassroots ecopreneurship at the base of the pyramid (BoP). Our study is anchored by the research question, “How are grassroots ecopreneurs at the BoP of Kenya motivated?” The participants were mainly drawn from beneficiaries of a multinational Non-Governmental Organization. Using a grounded theory approach, we conducted 12 qualitative case studies, 10 focus groups and 2 interviews, recording 61 participants. We triangulated data sources through data collected from primary and secondary sources, such as archival documents and archival interviews. Extant research suggests that grassroots ecopreneurs (GEs) at the BoP primarily engage in necessity-driven ventures. However, this study demonstrates that GEs’ motives to launch new ventures appear to be multifaceted and simultaneous (not linear or sequential). We also observed an interlinkage of environmental and economic motives in GEs who diversified their investments into related and unrelated areas. Our findings also indicate that GEs at the BoP developed socio-ethical motives-the GEs’ concerns toward other members of the community-and a desire to create social value beyond private value. All these motives contributed to the GEs establishing and sustaining viable businesses.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to address the research question: How does the social entrepreneur’s compassion inform how they engage with their environment to mobilize resources for social entrepreneurial action?Design/methodology/approachThe study features a comparative case study analysis of seven high-profile social entrepreneurs within Cape Town, South Africa. Data via in-depth interviews, site visits and archival information and follow-up conversations were collected and then analyzed via thematic coding of qualitative analysis.FindingsThe findings suggest that compassion is an antecedent for the social entrepreneurial boundary spanning shaped by their orientation toward concern for others’ well-being. Propositions presented offer the groundwork for an emergent theoretical framework of social entrepreneurial boundary spanning.Originality/valueThe study builds upon the emerging compassion research within social entrepreneurship, extending the conceptualization of compassion to be shapers of the social structure – not just the individual or the organization – in an emerging market context.

Bricolage is commonly recognized as a practice of non-traditional resource mobilization by immigrant entrepreneurs within their country of residence. When the host country is in an adversarial social and institutional context characterized by the liability of foreignness, we posit that accessing “resources at hand” in the external environment is hampered by anti-immigrant sentiments, both socially and institutionally. Through a rigorous analysis of eight cases of immigrant entrepreneurs and their South African-based enterprises, we apply Bourdieu’s theory of practice to examine the practice of bricolage at a more nuanced level. Our findings suggest that the localized prejudice against immigrants ‘otherizes’ their foreignness, and in turn, heightens the entrepreneurs’ awareness of their habitus. We argue that the immigrants’ ‘heightened habitus’ represents an internalization of both cognitive (i.e. resources at head) and adaptive (i.e. resources at heart) dispositions informed by the home country, and which serve as crucial endogenous resources by which to reimagine and reconstruct external resources accessed via local social capital. We present the novel theoretical contribution of immigrant entrepreneurial bricolage as the utilization of both endogenous resources at head and heart, which are activated by – and intended to overcome – their liability of foreignness. Our contribution also aims to reconstruct the frequently referenced exogenous resources at hand.

This paper offers a theorization of African diaspora venture creation. We postulate that the motivation for forming trans-local networks – to offer security when socially vulnerable or to pursue bu...

We explore immigrant entrepreneurship using structuration theory to understand how migrant‐led venture creation conducts socially‐intersective market activity in the host country of high economic inequality and social exclusion. Applying Gidden's structuration theory to immigrant entrepreneurship (1994), we unravel the co‐evolutionary process of both the entrepreneurial agent and the social structure of the host country via three phases of venture creation. We collected and examined original and longitudinal empirical data of eight South African‐based immigrant entrepreneurs using a process‐oriented theory‐building approach. Our findings unveil a process by which home and host institutions shape immigrant entrepreneurial agency to identify non‐ethnic business opportunities and to form relationships across diverse actors that counter existing norms of intergroup segregation and hostility. The process illustrates how an immigrant's social orientation to his/her host country's structure changes over time, and symbiotically, how the immigrant entrepreneur's actions – which break socially constructed boundaries – also change the social structure.

Applying Bourdieu’s theory of practice, we theorize the non- traditional resource mobilization of immigrant entrepreneurs within the adversarial social and institutional context of their country of...

The paper explores the social networks of South African micro-entrepreneurs in order to understand the socially-embedded resources that micro-entrepreneurs apply towards their innovation process. The paper posits that the social capital embedded within the network of a micro-entrepreneur is activated by the demands of the innovation process to generate other forms of resources by which the innovation process is facilitated. Analysing empirical data collected via in-depth interviews of urban micro-entrepreneurs in the Johannesburg metropolitan area, the analysis conceptually organizes these various forms of socially embedded resources into an original framework referred to as Network Diversity Value (NDV). Two central dimensions frame NDV – the orientation of the innovation process and the form of the emerging resource. The interaction of these dimensions reveal a variety of network-based resources perceived as valuable, and suggest a greater degree of complexity and nuance in the South African micro-entrepreneur’s innovative process than that which common discourse conveys.

While studies on immigrant entrepreneurship have acknowledged the influence of a firm’s host country embeddedness on its bricolage activity – making do or finding alternative uses for resources at hand, the influence of the immigrant’s home embeddedness tends to be an implied or an under-examined part of the immigrant’s entrepreneurial process. Through a rigorous analysis of eight cases of immigrant entrepreneurs and their South African-based enterprises, our findings suggest that entrepreneurial identity – shaped by the entrepreneurs’ home countries cultural and cognitive embeddedness – plays a moderating role between how they engage network-embedded resources in the host country and how they conduct bricolage with the resources.

The Social Innovation Lab is a pedagogical experiment within the MBA programme of the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business. Exploring social innovation through the lens of institutional work, the Lab asks participants, who have not formerly identified themselves as social change agents, to begin to think and act like system innovators. The Lab develops an action heuristic by drawing on research in the fields of institutional theory, positive organizational scholarship, critical pedagogy, network theory, and stakeholder engagement, among others. This heuristic focuses on shifting from a corrective action lens to a transformative action lens. Using this lens, Lab participants engage in real-world, real-time social innovation projects of their own devising.

This chapter focuses on the smallholder outgrower model for Jatropha biofuel cultivation in Tanzania. This model is based on seed production by small farmers who sell to a processing company that presses the bio-oil from the seeds locally, either for the local market or for export. This model has been implemented by a foreign investor in Tanzania; the social business model aims at combining profit making with social and environmental objectives. This chapter describes the trends and developments of this innovative business model in a global cultivation, production and usage chain, exploring the trade-offs between the people, planet, profit objectives (triple P) and how the business model adapts to survive through the different stages of the innovation process. The three stages in the innovation process, also described in learning theories are: (1) learning to be effective, (2) learning to be efficient and (3) learning to expand (up-scaling and diffusion). The observed trend is that in the different stages different roles are played by the company as it aims at shifting from subsidy funds to profit making. In the process of becoming efficient and starting to upscale, it seems harder to ensure the implementation of the social and environmental objectives. Therefore, public actors will have to play a more active role in capacity building and market regulation, and additional funding has to be made available for ensuring the social and environmental benefits. New innovations in governance and new ways of linking actors may be part of the solution.