Entrepreneurship and Social Change: Putting People at the Center of Social Transformation in Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Entrepreneurship is frequently considered by academics and practitioners as valuable mean to achieve social transformation (for instance in tackling poverty, inequality, homelessness, and environmental issues, such as ecological degradation, and climate change), and how these social changes are created continues to generate interest among researchers (e.g., Saebi, Foss, & Linder, 2019; George, Howard-Grenville, Joshi & Tihanyi, 2016). Considering the growing literature on entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship, and the size and scale of the African continent, surprisingly few studies have engaged with and explored how different types of entrepreneurship can lead to social change in African countries (Rivera-Santos, Holt, Littlewood, & Kolk, 2015; Zoogah, Peng, & Woldu, 2015). Moreover, while many in Africa seek profound societal change, research on social change is limited and fragmented, and ultimately fails to put the people (entrepreneurs, customers, communities and the civil society) at the centre of such societal transformation. This presenter symposium seeks to address two fundamental shortcomings in current organization, management, and entrepreneurship scholarship. First, the symposium seeks to provide deeper knowledge on the practices and processes that lead to social change in African contexts. Particularly, African countries seek societal transformation, but people tend to be at the margins of such processes and practices of social change. On one hand, entrepreneurs seek to exploit market opportunities for social change, but face several constraints, such as lack of resources, weak institutions, marginalization etc. (Littlewood, Ciambotti, Holt, & Steinfield, 2022; Busch & Barkema, 2020). On the other hand, people and communities in such contexts face severe challenges such as poverty and resource-scarcity, making change difficult to happen. This evidence calls for peculiar and localized processes and practices to social change which take effectively in consideration such challenges. Second, the symposium responds to the critique that prior research has silenced theory development in non-Western contexts (Hamann et al., 2020; Banerjee, 2022). Most recently scholars have highlighted the need to explicate how the learnings derived from a better understanding of how African communities organize local responses to local needs creates opportunities for indigenous people-centric theory development (Bruton, Zahra, Van de Ven, & Hitt, 2022). Such broader knowledge contextualizes social change by revealing ‘decolonized’ approaches to social change in Africa, as well as ‘unconventional’ approaches (Slade-Shantz, Kistruck, & Zietsma, 2018; Weber, Fasse, Haugh, & Grote, 2022; Bakker & McMullen, 2023). The paper presentations included in this symposium shed light on four practices and processes that lead to social change in Africa, while putting people at the center of this important transformation. Unexpected Events as Sources of Opportunity: Enabling Serendipity in Context of Extreme Uncertainty Author: Christian Busch; USC Marshall School of Business Prosocial Growth in the Informal Economy: A study of Microentrepreneurs in South Africa Author: David Littlewood; U. of Sheffield Management School Author: Margot Leger; Utrecht U. School of Economics Author: Philip James O'Donnell; Dublin City U. Author: Diane L. Holt; Leeds U. Business School Solidarity as Response to Crises: Organizing across Divided Spaces in South Africa Author: Ralph Hamann; U. of Cape Town Author: Jenny Soderbergh; U. of Cape Town Author: Annika Surmeier; U. of Cape Town Transforming healthcare through social franchising: Evidence from a health clinic network in Africa Author: Constance Dumalanède; Tecnologico de Monterrey Author: Giacomo Ciambotti; U. Cattolica del Sacro Cuore Author: Addisu A Lashitew; McMaster U.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".