Social entrepreneurship for dignity and changean exploration of five social enterprises focused on childcare and development in selected developing countries

Résumé

The present investigation aims to understand the phenomenon of social entrepreneurship from an anthropological perspective. The reason for selecting this approach is the considerable lack of grounded theory in that area. Instead priority has been given to various economic approaches, which limit understanding of this ancient phenomenon and tend to overlook the relevance of critical personal and daily management factors influencing the sustainability of the social enterprise and the social entrepreneur as well. The main goals of this thesis are three. First, the thesis pays specific attention to the situations the social entrepreneurs who create social enterprises in developing countries go through, describing the motivations and other transformations that the founding experience unchains. Linked to those subjective realities, the second goal aims to observe the existence of common operations among the selected, but separate social enterprises. The third goal is related to understanding the factors that generate risk for the sustainability of the organizations and the founders, trying to delimit the factors as precisely as possible. The results of this research, in spite of their open-ended character which will require further research to be confirmed through concatenation, bear on these three goals in diverse ways. The research follows an exploratory qualitative methodology to build ground theory from the data. Considerable observation and numerous semi-structured interviews (N = 108) were conducted during a period of almost sixteen months devoted to fieldwork in five social enterprises in five selected developing countries.