Practices of defining the notion of social entrepreneurship

Abstract

The paper presents the results of an interdisciplinary comparative analysis of modern research practices concerning social entrepreneurship in Russian and foreign traditions in order to establish the specifics of defining the notion of social entrepreneurship in interdisciplinary discourse. The analytical basis of the study comprised the fundamental provisions and concepts of open innovation and human capital, the theory of public goods, the theoretical provisions concerning the structure and substance of social action, corporate social responsibility, the concept of uneven innovation activity, the principles of social partnership, social viability and complementarity. The research problems were solved using the methods of systems, structural and functional, institutional, comparative and content analyses. The selection of analysed papers was conducted in the databases of the analytical information platform Web of Science, the National Scientific Citation Database Russian Science Citation Index, the Scopus abstract base, the databases of academic networks ResearchGate, Academia.edu, etc. The paper indicates that Russian and foreign discourses address the problem of social entrepreneurship primarily in the context of economic, managerial, sociological, psychological and pedagogical research practices. It observes differentiation in the approaches to the conceptualisation and definition of the notion of social entrepreneurship under the applicable subject axiomatics and methodology and identifies the specifics of defining the notion of social entrepreneurship in interdisciplinary discourse. The research results make the foundation for further development of the methodology of definitions in the area of social entrepreneurship and serve to ensure consistency in the respective subject field and its relevance to the complex nature of social entrepreneurship as a phenomenon calling to be addressed from systemic and interdisciplinary positions