Not a One-Person Job! Community Matters.
Research Paper Title:
“Communities at the nexus of entrepreneurship and societal impact: A cross-disciplinary literature review”
Authors:
Background:
More than ever, societal challenges, such as poverty, climate change, and inequality, manifest in communities, and solutions need to be developed for, in, with, and by the members of communities. Consequently, many development agendas and programs that rely on entrepreneurship to improve conditions place special emphasis on communities and the roles they can play. Although the academic literature increasingly calls for research that treats communities as more than just mere beneficiaries of entrepreneurial action, the authors lack a clear understanding of the community construct and of the various roles that communities assume in entrepreneurial initiatives aiming to create societal impact.
The authors conduct a systematic cross-disciplinary review of the literature to address this gap. The authors find five primary types of community: a community of place, identity, fate, interest, and practice, that the authors combine and describe in a novel typology of community. Our review also reveals a continuum of community roles and the authors find six community roles beneficiary, context, supporter, partner, opportunity creator, and entrepreneur.
Highlights:
Community research lacks construct clarity and an integrative framework across disciplines.
The authors review 227 articles across five major disciplines on entrepreneurship, community, and societal impact.
The authors find five community types—place, identity, fate, interest, and practice.
The authors find six community roles—beneficiary, context, supporter, partner, opportunity creator, and entrepreneur.
Communities are often dynamic—morphing and emerging anew—in pursuit of entrepreneurship and societal impact creation.
Results:
The authors identify a new typology of community and propose a comprehensive framework of roles through which societal impact is created by entrepreneurship for, in, with, enabled by, and driven by communities.
The authors demonstrate that the key to understanding how the community relates to societal impact creation is to jointly account for both its type(s) and role(s). By linking community types and roles, the findings also suggest a theoretical contribution based on the relationship between the degree of formalization of a community type and the degree of agency that a community role enacts.
The authors underscore that communities are not just static settings but can also be dynamic actors in efforts to use entrepreneurship to create societal impact.
Conclusion:
Our cross-disciplinary review highlights trends and gaps in the extant literature and provides researchers with an evidence-based research agenda to guide future inquiry on communities at the nexus of entrepreneurship and societal impact.