Exploring the Sustainability of Social Enterprises: A Scoping Review

Abstract

Background: The purpose of this current scoping review was to identify elements of sustainability of the social enterprises and publication patterns, including dominant themes, knowledge frameworks, and future research avenues. This paper hence tried to understand how scholarship guides the development of social entrepreneurship in the face of social and environmental challenges. Methods: All the data were extracted using SCOPUS, while VoSviewer and Biblioshiny were used for the bibliometric analysis. The present analysis was limited to a thematic cluster that was done by time analysis, assessment of geographical distribution, and keyword-based clustering. The results were then validated by statistical tests to make the results more robust. Results: The thematic analysis identifies the dominant ten thematic clusters, representative of the current publication patterns and dominant trends in the domain of social entrepreneurship. The given paper underlines the role of entrepreneurial thinking in the context of sustainable development to attain the three factors of economic growth, environmental conservation, and social equity. Conclusion: The results present the fact that the role of research has to be ongoing with respect to the impact assessment of social enterprises towards poverty reduction and environmental sustainability. The study calls for innovation in the theoretical framework and interdisciplinarity between social enterprises with the engagement of researchers and scholars in the generation and analysis of solutions for the manifold problems of society towards a more just and sustainable world.

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Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.