Social Entrepreneurship and COVID‐19

• Date: 01 January 2021
• Published date: 01 January 2021
• Author: G. T. Lumpkin,Sophie Bacq
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12641

© 2020 Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Social Entrepreneurship and COVID-19

Sophie Bacqa and G. T. Lumpkinb

aIndiana University; bUniversity of Oklahoma

Keywords: communities, collective action, COVID-19, cross-sector solutions, social

entrepreneurship, social issues, societal impact

COVID-19 has changed the world. The pandemic is a public health crisis with profound

implications for society. It follows that research efforts focused on addressing societal is-

sues such as social entrepreneurship (SE) – ‘the practice of addressing social problems by

means of markets’ (Mair, 2020, p. 333) – will also be deeply altered. In this commentary,

we reflect on how the current COVID-19 pandemic and future pandemics have affected,

and will affect, research on the topic of SE. We unearth five fundamental assumptions

underlying the field of SE that have been challenged by this crisis, consider their im-

plications for research in the space, and propose future research questions to guide SE

scholarship.

First, SE researchers assume that it is social entrepreneurs’ prosocial motives that lead

to positive social outcomes. However, to tackle social problems caused by COVID-19,

many businesses stepped-up to create solutions benefitting the public good, without re-

gard to their initial motives – e.g., manufacturers made plastic shields and ventilators,

distilleries produced highly sought-after hand sanitizer – often offering these solutions

below cost. While there is little doubt that these ventures helped others (the essence of the

term ‘prosocial’), their founders did not necessarily express prosocial motives at venture

inception. As such, the global COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the assumed link be-

tween prosocial motives and social outcomes to be potentially tenuous. If entrepreneur-

ial ventures and established businesses can achieve positive social outcomes regardless

of their motivations – for example, by rapidly deploying solutions in the face of a global

crisis such as COVID-19 – and if social entrepreneurs driven by social motives do not

always achieve intended social outcomes, this suggests challenging questions about the

overlap between SE and entrepreneurship as research domains: (1) To what extent are

Journal of Man agement Studi es 58:1 Januar y 2021

doi:10. 1111/j om s. 126 41

Address for reprints: Sophie Bacq, Department of Management & Entrepreneurship, Kelley School of Business,

Indiana University, 1309 E 10th Street | Hodge Hall 3147, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA (bacqs@iu.edu).