SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW ON SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN SWEDEN - A context specific analysis of social entrepreneurship

Abstract

Faced with the fact that no consensus exists in defining social entrepreneurship, coupled with multiple academics stressing the importance of context to understand the concept, the author aim to further research this topic by investigating how social entrepreneurship is applied within a specific national context - Sweden. Relevant literature of social entrepreneurship is presented, and the national context of Sweden is outlined to act as a framework upon which the data is analyzed and discussed. In order to best find relevant literature, a systematic literature review was performed, and through it 54 documents that discuss social entrepreneurship within the Swedish context are retrieved and synthesized. What is found is that the majority of documents focus on specifically on rural development, marginalized groups in society, and the environment, while about a quarter of the documents approach social entrepreneurship more generally. The main themes and sub themes are then further analytically explored. Furthermore, the author explores and find sectoral differences that are visualized in a figure of three spectra of opposing dualities (fig 1). The different types of social change, as presented by Zahra et al. (2009) are discussed, and an interesting connection are found between the social bricoleur and rural development, as well as the social engineer and academics inclination to promote a (radical) change of discourse. The importance of the social mission and networks are represented by the literature, but one final thing that the documents in the Swedish context highlight is the idea that the social entrepreneur aims to make oneself redundant and that the social innovation is intended to be shared and adapted by society. The study provide the reader with an extensive representation of how social entrepreneurship has been applied in Sweden and can hopefully act as a great document for any reader interested in a summary of what is of focus in Sweden and what gaps can be fund within this context.