Contextualizing a social enterprise opportunity process in an emerging market

Over the past decade, there has been increasing pressure, globally, to find effective ways to respond to the challenges presented by poverty and marginalization. Nowhere are these challenges more pronounced than in eastern and southern Africa where there are some of the highest concentrations of poor people in the world (Ramirez, 2011). Evidence suggests that current management theory and practice, which is based upon a Western context, has not proven to be effective (Rogers et al. , 2011) in informing policy and practice in emerging markets (Illetschko, 2011). Indeed, the incipient field of social entrepreneurship also is of limited help in this regard, as its conceptual development is in its infancy (Jones et al. , 2008; Diochon et al. , 2011; Arend, 2013; Choi and Majumdar, 2014). Despite the need to build a context-specific knowledge base which, in turn, can inform future theory and practice (Siqué, 2012), the response has been limited.

In aiming to address this need, the article focuses on a particular emerging market context - Sub-Saharan Africa - in an effort to contribute to a better understanding of how social entrepreneurship emerges. Amidst a lack of definitional consensus (Haugh, 2012), it is important to set out what is meant by social entrepreneurship. Here one of the most widely used definitions is adopted: "the innovative use and combination of resources to pursue opportunities to catalyze social change and/or address social needs" (Mair and Marti, 2006, p. 37). This definition highlights the importance of "opportunity" to our understanding of social entrepreneurship. Indeed, how an opportunity is brought to fruition in an emerging market context is the specific focus of this research.

The centrality of the opportunity concept to entrepreneurship research, generally, has been attributed to Shane and Venkataraman's (2000) seminal article that identified "opportunity" as the distinctive area for entrepreneurship research, from which considerable scholarship has ensued. Yet, there has been very little real-time longitudinal research which, arguably, is fundamental to any investigation of process.

One form of social enterprise[1], the micro-franchise, is said to have the capacity to create opportunities that are viable in the short term and sustainable in the long term (Illetschko, 2011). Yet, how this occurs has yet to be empirically studied. Considering the salience of the "opportunity" concept...