Founder's background as a catalyst for social entrepreneurship

• Published date: 01 September 2019
• Author: Nurgul Keles Taysir,Cigdem Asarkaya
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/nml.21353
• Date: 01 September 2019

RESEARCH NOTE

Founder's background as a catalyst for social

entrepreneurship

Cigdem Asarkaya | Nurgul Keles Taysir

Business Administration Department, Istanbul

Commerce University, Istanbul, Turkey

Correspondence

Cigdem Asarkaya, Business Administration

Department, Istanbul Commerce University,

Sutluce, Istanbul 34445, Turkey.

Email: casarkaya@ticaret.edu.tr

Social entrepreneurship has a long history of practice

worldwide. However, the concept has become widely

popular among researchers over the last two decades.

Despite this popularity, less is known about the process,

which leads to becoming a social entrepreneur. Barendsen

and Gardner’s study shows that many social entrepreneurs

have traumatic experience in their early lives; however,

there are no supporting studies investigating the impact of

the background of founders on the founding decision of

their entities. Because of that we utilized the models of

theory of planned behavior as well as the concept of

imprinting to explain the process that leads to entrepre-

neurial behavior. The purpose of our study is to investi-

gate the life stories of some Turkish social entrepreneurs,

and to explore which factors in these people's back-

grounds may have contributed to their decisions to estab-

lish their foundations.

KEYWORDS

founder's background, founding decision, social

entrepreneurship, Turkey

1|INTRODUCTION

There are numerous definitions of social entrepreneurship, out of which we adopted the following:

“aiming to create social value and pursuing that goal through exploiting opportunities, employing

innovation, tolerating risk and declining to accept limitations”(Peredo & McLean, 2006, p. 56).

Barendsen and Gardner (2004) emphasize that social entrepreneurs “are taking on issues and

populations that governments either can't or won't tackle”(p. 50). Thus social entrepreneurs may par-

tially compensate the weakness of the state and provide considerable social value. Analysis and

detection of the characteristics of successful social entrepreneurs may enable our societies and organi-

zations to be more aware of such people and provide them with stronger support. This in turn may

Received: 27 September 2017 Revised: 25 December 2018 Accepted: 9 January 2019

DOI: 10.1002/nml.21353

Nonprofit Management and Leadership. 2019;30:155–166. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/nml © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 155