Social Innovation Learning From Critical Social Entrepreneurship Studies: How Are They Critical, and Why Do We Need Them?

Social entrepreneurship is often represented as a panacea for solving social problems, such as exclusion, marginalization, poverty and inequality, in Western societies, as well as in developing countries. This chapter sheds light on issues that are relevant not only to social entrepreneurship research but also to social innovation research more generally. Social entrepreneurship can be considered as a particular field in the broader range of social innovation research, and the concept represents some of the same ambitions and addresses the same challenges as social innovation. The chapter focuses on three dimensions of critique in particular, namely, the implications for social entrepreneurship as a concept of social change, methodological considerations about the position of the researcher and the role of normativity. It analyzes and discusses critique as a research strategy in social entrepreneurship studies by in-depth analysis of 10 contributions that conduct some form of critique.