Doing good, staying capitalist: Business school representations of social entrepreneurship and the commitment to capitalism

In recent decades, social entrepreneurship (SE) has gained widespread appeal as a way to deliver sustainable social change across sectors. Within business schools, SE has been institutionalized as the pedagogy that prepares business students to solve social challenges. It has also been heralded as a way to address the “crisis of legitimacy of capitalism.” While SE has been widely studied, its role as a response to critiques of capitalism and business schools has received less attention. To address this, and drawing theoretical inspiration from Boltanski and Chiapello’s New Spirit of Capitalism , this article explores how business schools, through their representations of SE, sustain and reproduce capitalist commitments. Using a critical discourse analysis-informed approach to analyze SE texts from elite business schools, we show how business schools’ representation of SE, leveraging SE’s ontological emptiness, addresses fairness, ensures security and generates excitement and maintains commitments to capitalism. In doing so, it sheds light on the role of the business school and management education in the transformation of capitalism and underscores the limitations of the business school as a leader in addressing social challenges.