Social entrepreneurship and alienation

Social entrepreneurship is a mass social phenomenon that today is being realized on a global scale. Almost all definitions of entrepreneurship, including social entrepreneurship, emphasize the element of innovation as the main identifier of entrepreneurial activity. Innovation involves introducing a change through seeing new possibilities for solutions that were not perceived previously. In this vein, social entrepreneurship, on the micro-level of individual action, is here identified with innovative action. To analyze social entrepreneurship is to analyze the conditions under which innovative action can emerge. The current efforts to explain entrepreneurial action in psychological terms, or by psychologizing the concept of action, are unconvincing. The theoretical framework put forward in the present discussion for interpreting the concept of social entrepreneurship is grounded in Merton's contribution to the theory of alienation, particularly in his conception of innovation as a type of alienation or anomie.

Merton argues that innovative action is associated with "imperfect socialization," whereby individuals disapprove of the available means for attaining culturally approved goals even though they have fully internalized the cultural goals and aspirations in question.  To explain the transformation of social entrepreneurship into a mass social phenomenon is to explain how unsuccessful socialization has become a condition of mass socialization. The reasons for the growth of social entrepreneurship during the last decade of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century are connected with the extensive process of migration and the resulting multicultural societies in which both cultural goals and institutional means for attaining these goals are constantly challenged.