How social enterprises nurture empowerment: a grounded theoretical model of social change

Abstract

Our understanding of how social enterprises enable social change is still limited. Empowerment could be a valid mediating construct to explain the processes occurring between entrepreneurial practices and achievement of social goals. Based on an ethnography case study in a South African social enterprise, this study reveals the entrepreneurial practices that contribute to women’s empowerment and the power-accruing processes that provide female workers access and control over resources and a sense of individual and collective achievement that facilitates the rupture of patriarchal gender roles. This empowerment-based model contributes to explain social change processes inherent in the phenomenon of social entrepreneurship.

Our understanding of how social enterprises enable social change is still limited. Empowerment could be a valid mediating construct to explain the processes occurring between entrepreneurial practices and achievement of social goals. Based on an ethnography case study in a South African social enterprise, this study reveals the entrepreneurial practices that contribute to women’s empowerment and the power-accruing processes that provide female workers access and control over resources and a sense of individual and collective achievement that facilitates the rupture of patriarchal gender roles. This empowerment-based model contributes to explain social change processes inherent in the phenomenon of social entrepreneurship.