Internationalisation process of social enterprises: A study of entry mode stages

Abstract

Social entrepreneurship has been practiced for a long time now and has received increasing attention over the years. However, little is known about the methods that social enterprises use to expand their presence in foreign countries (Zahra, 2008; Mair and Marti, 2006). Most of the current investigations on social entrepreneurship are from descriptive case studies and no adequate research has addressed the issue (Wang et al. 2015). The literature on internationalisation of social enterprises is not developed and an essential need can be seen to explicitly study international orientations of these type of enterprises (Sharir and Lerner, 2006). By choosing to emphasis on internationalisation of social enterprises, i.e. studying the entry modes used by social enterprises from a three stage perspective, which contains a large number of social enterprises in the UK, this research develops understanding within a large and growing phenomena. Original contributions made in this area include identification of market selection motives behind SE’s internationalisation, identification of market entry strategies by social enterprises, and discovering the reasons behind entry mode choices. Nevertheless, to name a few; original theoretical contributions were made in entry mode choices, where SEs select their entry mode according to their anticipated social change. They overcome their resource constraint from bricolage, and they see networks as vital tools for expansion and internationalisation in social capital theory. These opportunities were addressed in this thesis by analysing eighteen international social enterprises in the UK through semi-structured interviews. The data indicated that majority of social enterprises had intrinsic motivation to leave their social impact beyond the UK borders as they were seeking the most deprived communities. After analysing the data it was found that social enterprises had chosen their entry modes based on social mission control, social mission urgency, government dependency, funding dependency, or special requirements. The identified and highly modified entry modes (compared to those of the commercial enterprises) were licensing, franchising, subcontracting, joint venture, acquisition, and green-field.