Resistance to Social Entrepreneurship: How Context Shapes Innovation

Social entrepreneurship emerges from social and historical contexts. These contexts also bring the institutional norms, routines, and conventions that challenge and constrain innovation processes. This article contributes to the emerging theoretical discourse of social entrepreneurship by explicating the Schumpeterian notion of resistance. It discusses the context-dependent manifestation of opportunity in, and resistance to, social entrepreneurship. Social entrepreneurship opportunities are the constructed outcomes of entrepreneurial alertness and motivation, and the organizational, societal, institutional, and market contexts in which the entrepreneur is embedded. Likewise, these contextual forces resist and refine social innovations such that they become the products of the financial, social, cultural, and political expectations of stakeholders of social entrepreneurship ventures. A deeper understanding of how context shapes social innovation will give scholars and practitioners a greater appreciation for the ways in which innovations can succeed because of resistance, not in spite of it.