Commentary: What's in a Name? Defining Social Entrepreneurship

• Author: Rick Aubry
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12761
• Published date: 01 May 2017
• Date: 01 May 2017

What’s in a Name? Def‌i ning Social Entrepreneurship 431

Rick Aubry was chief executive officer

of Rubicon Programs, a social enterprise in

Richmond, California, from 1986 to 2009,

where he launched numerous programs

and ventures. He was also assistant provost

for social entrepreneurship and community

engagement and professor of practice at

Tulane University from 2010 through 2016.

E-mail: raubry@tulane.edu

Commentary

I n the article “Social Entrepreneurship,

Entrepreneurship, Collectivism, and Everything

in Between: Prototypes and Continuous

Dimensions,” Aaron Schneider provides an essential

contribution to the nascent scholarly interest in social

entrepreneurship. The academic problem for the

field that his article helps address is the definitional

one: simply put, what is and what is not a social

entrepreneurial endeavor?

This is not merely a question akin to that of the

number of angels on the head of a pin. With the

continued growth of the social entrepreneurship

field, the need to solve significant global ills,

and the limited resources with which to do so,

those who make resource allocation decisions

in pursuit of social change have a critical need

for a way to evaluate the relative value of an

intervention compared with alternatives. Further,

the field of social entrepreneurship devotes an

inordinate amount of time to deciding what its

own definition is and who is, or is not, a social

entrepreneur. The approach that Schneider offers is

a refreshing way to get past the classical taxonomy

of “in or out” and provide a continuum of impact

effect in which to place and contrast social

entrepreneurship.

The article is invaluable in three ways. First, it offers

a thorough and thoughtful survey of scholarly and

practitioner writings on the subject: anyone interested

in the field will be well served by the breadth of its

introduction to the writers on the subject. Second,

the article puts social entrepreneurship in the

context of other interventions that create value,

including collectivization approaches and so-called

pure entrepreneurship. Finally, by providing a visual

and “continuous dimension” approach to the field

rather than a rigid set of check-box characteristics, a

“DNA blood test,” to rule in or out, the methodology

offers a more realistic tool to survey the numerous

activities that broadly can be construed as social

entrepreneurship.

In the absence of this approach, what is or is not social

entrepreneurship is currently left to individualized

definitions. Despite numerous studies cited in the

article that attempt to provide the ultimate rules,

in this writer ’ s experience, definitions are chosen to

serve either of two purposes: foundations that see

their scope as supporting social entrepreneurship use

them to decide what to fund, and they and others use

them to evaluate the relative impact of different social

entrepreneurs. Rather than gnash his teeth as many

foundation boards do about why their definition is

right and others are wrong, Schneider ’ s continuum

allows for greater transparency about what each

intervention is doing in pursuit of value creation

and allows that spectral comparison to help scholars,

funders, and governments decide what advances their

mission best.

Of particular importance is the colocating of social

entrepreneurship with other strategies to create value:

rather than engage in the definitional arguments

currently in the field such as “all entrepreneurship

Rick Aubry

What ’ s in a Name? Defining Social Entrepreneurship

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 77, Iss. 3, pp. 431–432. © 2017 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12761.