Essays on the process of social entrepreneurship at the macro-level, meso-level and micro-level

Social entrepreneurship has considerably attracted the attention of scholars and different stakeholders such as educators, investors and government institutions. Social entrepreneurial ventures primarily pursue social and/or environmental objectives through commercial activities and by utilizing a wide range of resources. Over the last few years, there has been an abundance of theoretical, conceptual and empirical papers that have made social entrepreneurship navigate from a nascent stage of development to an area of rapid growth with a surge of research output. Despite this widespread and growing research attention, a substantial amount of knowledge gap revolves in our understanding of the process of social entrepreneurship. My PhD research contributes by shedding light on the multi-level nature of social entrepreneurship by examining how the social entrepreneurial process manifests at the micro-level, meso-level and macro-level. The four chapters of my dissertation draw on theory from the field of management to investigate the different dynamics of social entrepreneurship, through induction, deduction and abduction. The first chapter of my thesis draws data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2015 report and contributes by examining the external environmental factors that stimulate or impede social entrepreneurial activity at the macro-level (i.e. macro-level process). The second chapter of my thesis is a qualitative study that focuses on the structure of hybrid organizing (i.e. meso-level process). The current literature on hybrid organizing in social entrepreneurship highlights the different tensions, such as conflicting institutional logics, stakeholder value mismatch and mission-drift, evoked by this structure. In this chapter, my research investigation takes a contrary stance and explores two main advantages of hybrid organizing in social entrepreneurship. The third chapter of my thesis is a quantitative inquiry that primarily investigates crowdfunding (i.e. meso-level process) as a strategic alternative to the fundraising process for social entrepreneurial ventures. The fourth chapter of my thesis primarily explores the motivation of women social entrepreneurs (i.e. micro-level process), thus teasing out the reason why women, more often than men, are motivated to engage in social entrepreneurial processes. To conclude, the findings from the above studies not only generate a deeper theoretical understanding of this field, but also contributes by highlighting that social entrepreneurship is a unique and complex multi-level process that is rare yet constantly growing.(ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 201