For the People, for the Planet: How Social Entrepreneurs in the Global South and Facilitators from the Global North Construct Legitimacy for the Field of Social Entrepreneurship
Abstract: In efforts to leverage private sector approaches for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), social entrepreneurship has gained popularity drawing on a hybrid approach of business-minded strategies for pursuing a social mission. Legitimacy construction serves to justify resource allocation by facilitators from the Global North and pitch for resource acquisition by social entrepreneurs in the Global South. However, legitimacy construction is complicated by the hybrid nature of social entrepreneurship and the multiplicity of stakeholders from different institutional contexts. This study investigates how legitimacy is discursively constructed for social entrepreneurship as an organizational field. It helps shed light on the under-researched context of the Global South, exploring social entrepreneurship in Sub-Saharan Africa. Giving voice not only to facilitators, but also to social entrepreneurs contributes to a holistic picture of legitimacy construction of the field. The study draws on qualitative linguistic interview and visual social media data from both groups and analyses legitimacy construction through multimodal discourse analysis. The main finding is: Pragmatic, moral and cognitive legitimacy are constructed on a continuum. Discourses of value creation and return on investment on the pragmatic and an idealized private sector on the cognitive end of the spectrum frame discourses of empowerment through local solutions and glorification of social entrepreneurship. The inherent tension between business and social spheres helps to discursively construct legitimacy by simultaneously catering to a variety of stakeholders. Underlying all accounts is a perceived failure of previous efforts by charity organizations and the public sector. Alignment of social entrepreneurs' and facilitators' accounts suggests the spanning of a meta-institutional context of social entrepreneurship that helps bridge discrepancies between Global North and Global South. Practitioners should not shy away from conflicting ideas when discursively constructing legitimacy since tensions are essential for a field under formation.
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