Social Network Analysis and the Sociology of Economics: Filling a Blind Spot with the Idea of Social Embeddedness

Today, social networks analysis has become a cross-disciplinary subject with applications in diverse fields of social and economic life. Different network designs provide different opportunities to communicate, to receive information and to create different structures of cultural capital. Network analysis explores modes and contents of exchanges between different agents when symbols, emotions or goods and services are exchanged. The message of the article is that social network analysis provides a tool to foster the understanding of social dynamics, which enhances recent debate on a micro-macro gap and on limitations of the cognitive and explanatory potential of economics.

The Ethics of Measuring Social Impact of Social Enterprise: Comparing Blended Value, SROI, and SAVE

This paper explores the ethical assumptions underlying three common methods of social impact measurement: the blended value approach (Emerson 2003), the social return of investment (SROI) (Arvidson et al. 2013), and the social added value evaluation (SAVE) (Bassi 2012). The purpose of this investigation is to broaden the understanding of ethical implications of selecting one of these three approaches, and to assess their strengths and weaknesses in an ethically informed way. Including ethics in social impact measurement is seen here as an important tool for increasing credibility and accountability of social enterprises. Social entrepreneurship, as the name suggests, combines elements of entrepreneurship with social focus or social mission (Peredo and McLean 2006; Huybrechts and Nicholls 2012). Although much of the existing social entrepreneurship literature assumes that the entrepreneurial and social part together lead to socially beneficial results, a consensus among scholars has been emerging recently that this does not have to be the case. The ethical ambiguity of social entrepreneurship stems from both of its elements: the entrepreneurial as well as the social. On the “entrepreneurship side” of the concept, some authors point out that entrepreneurship itself can be morally ambiguous since its essence lies in “rule-breaking” (Brenkert 2009). On the “social side,” a number of authors points to the fact that, despite the positive connotations of the “social,” it often remains empty or unexplained (Cho 2006; Bacq et al. 2016). The resulting complexity of the moral landscape of social entrepreneurship is increasingly becoming acknowledged by scholars (Dey and Steyaert 2016; Chell etal. 2016) which in turn brings further questioning of the“value-neutral” approach to social entrepreneurship which has been so far dominating the field. One of the key areas in which the ethical assumptions surrounding social entrepreneurship come up to the surface of scholarly discussion is the sphere of its social impact or "social value creation." This paper analyses the blended value approach, SROI and SAVE at two levels: First, it looks at the methodological foundations of these three approaches. It links their concern with subjective well-being as one of the most important indicators of created social value to broader discussions regarding the role of satisfaction in economics (Sen 1999; Bruni 2006). And second, it provides a literature review of existing case studies in which these measures have been applied to social enterprises and studied in an empirical manner. The results of this investigation are then discussed in the context of critical analysis of social entrepreneurship. Bibliography Arvidson, Malin; Fergus Lyon; Stephen McKay and Domenico Moro (2013).“Valuing the Social? The Nature and Controversies of Measuring Social Return on Investment (SROI)” Voluntary Sector Review4(1): 3-18. Bacq, Sophie; Chantal Hartog and Brigitte Hoogendoorn (2016). “Beyond the Moral Portrayal of Social Entrepreneurs: An Empirical Approach to Who They Are and What Drives Them” Journal of Business Ethics133: 703-718. Bassi, Andrea (2012). “How to Measure Intangibles? Towards a System of Indicators (S.A.V.E.) for the Measurement of the Performance of Social Enterprises” in Challenge Social Innovation, H.-W.Franz et al. (eds.). Springer: Heidelberg. Brenkert, George H. (2009). “Innovation, Rule Breaking and the Ethics of Entrepreneurship” Journal of Business Venturing 24: 448-464. Bruni, Luigino (2006). Civil Happiness: Economic and Human Flourishing in Historical Perspective. Routledge: London. Chell, Elizabeth; Laura J. Spence; Francesco Perrini and Jared D. Harris (2016). “Social Entrepreneurship and Business Ethics: Does Social Equal Ethical?” Journal of Business Ethics 133: 619-625. Cho, Albert H. (2006). “Politics, Values and Social Entrepreneurship,” in Social Entrepreneurship, Johanna Mair et al. (eds.). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Dey, Pascal and Chris Steyaert (2016). “Rethinking the Space of Ethics in Social Entrepreneurship: Power, Subjectivity, and Practices of Freedom” Journal of Business Ethics 133:627-641. Emerson, Jed (2003). “The Blended Value Proposition: Integrating Social and Financial Resources” California Management Review 45(4): 35-51. Huybrechts, Benjamin and Alex Nicholls (2012). “Social Entrepreneurship: Definitions, Drivers and Challenges,” in Social Entrepreneurship and Social Business, Christine K. Volkmann et al. (eds.) Wiesbaden: Springer Gabler. Peredo, Ana María and Murdith McLean (2006). “Social Entrepreneurship: A Critical Review of the Concept” Journal of World Business 41: 56-65. Sen, Amartya (1999). Development as Freedom. Alfred A. Knopf: New York.status: publishe

Empowered to Hope: The Impact of Social Entrepreneurship on Social Exclusion

This chapter links the research on hope in the fields of social exclusion and social entrepreneurship. In the area of social exclusion, understood here as exclusion from participation in key activities in the society, hope seems to be related both to the psychological effects of social exclusion (leading to emotional states related to hopelessness) and to the behavioral responses to social exclusion (where the possession of control or agency seems to be a factor influencing the decision between anti-social and pro-social behavior). Empirical research supports the idea that hope acts as an important motivator that helps people overcome social exclusion. In the field of social entrepreneurship, the situation is more complex: while hope seems to play a role in the lives of those who engage in social entrepreneurial activities, the existing research does not seem to pay much attention to it. The explanation proposed in this chapter claims that this is because the field of social entrepreneurship is dominated by a related, yet distinct, concept of empowerment. The similarities and differences between hope and empowerment are explored and argument is made that in order to become more relevant for this field of research, the concept of hope currently used in social sciences needs to be broadened to include more relational perspective.status: publishe