Main research areas and methods in social entrepreneurship

The main specific objective of this paper is to explore the content of research as well as methodological issues on social entrepreneurship in the context of corporate social economics and entrepreneurship. Therefore, in order to obtain an overview of the research done on this theme, we conducted a literature review using the exploratory analysis as methodology. We focused on the studies and articles which were published in the most important academic periodicals that cover subjects as management, economics and business. The articles were identified based on the presence of selected keywords in their title, abstract and body of the article: ‘social entrepreneur’, ‘social enterprise’, ‘social entrepreneurship’, ‘corporate social entrepreneurship’ and ‘social economy’. Using this method, there were selected articles and studies published starting from the last decade of the 1990s up to 2015. We were also interested in international publications on the topic and also in books that approached social entrepreneurship