Social entrepreneurship: laying the foundations of a nascent paradigm

Social entrepreneurship was imperative in the economic and political spheres since the 1980s, thanks to the efforts of powerful foundations such as Ashoka or the Grameen Bank, which aroused the interest of the scientific community in this phenomenon. Since the 1990s several research works concerning social entrepreneurship were born, giving birth to several definitions, conceptions, and theoretical readings, going from economics to anthropology. Nevertheless, the researchers were not able to develop a standardized theory, so leaving the field open for various interpretations of various disciplines made social entrepreneurship a metapragmatic field. The purpose of this article is to highlight the theoretical foundations of social entrepreneurship through a comparative approach. We first tried to entrench social entrepreneurship in time, after we had characterized it by the key concepts that make up the readings of the phenomenon," said we do not claim completeness our main goal is to find conceptual models allowing researchers to decipher the practices of social entrepreneurship in its different forms of socio-economic expression in different contexts, something that was achieved by our proposal of a sketch on the four conceptual pillars of social entrepreneurship.