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Introduction
Are entrepreneurs always either purely profit-driven or socially oriented? Or do these apparently distinct logics often co-exist in entrepreneurs' rationales? If this is the case, should we continue to distinguish between commercial and social entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship? And do entrepreneurs' logics alter over time and space? If so, how do they alter? To answer these questions, the aim of this paper is to evaluate critically the extensively used social vs commercial entrepreneurship dualism that depicts these as entirely discrete realms which possess distinct and separate logics.
To do this, the first section documents the emergence of the commercial vs social entrepreneurship dichotomy that has represented entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship as either commercial or social. To begin to evaluate critically the validity of this commercial vs social entrepreneurship dichotomy, the second section will then introduce a survey of entrepreneurs conducted in urban and rural deprived and affluent English localities involving 865 face-to-face interviews. The third section will then report the results. This will display the need to transcend the depiction of commercial and social entrepreneurship as separate and discrete entities, and to recognise the existence of a spectrum of forms of entrepreneurship that changes both temporally and socio-spatially. The paper then concludes by beginning to explore the implications both for theory and public policy.
At the outset, however, entrepreneurship in general and social entrepreneurship more particularly, needs to be defined. Until now, and given that "entrepreneurship means different things to different people" ([3] Anderson and Starnawska, 2008, p. 222), such endeavour has been defined in multiple ways, each of which heavily influences subsequent findings on the extent and nature of this endeavour ([33] McKay et al. , 2010). Here, in consequence, a working definition is adopted appropriate to the task at hand. An entrepreneur is defined as somebody actively involved in starting a business or the owner/manager of a business that is less than 36 months old ([28] Harding et al. , 2005; [39] Reynolds et al. , 2002). Commercial entrepreneurship therefore involves those actively involved in starting a business or are the owner/manager of a business that is less than 36 months old that is grounded in a for-profit objective. Social entrepreneur, meanwhile, is here narrowly defined as somebody who is actively involved in...