Young Social Entrepreneurs – Identity and Action

Light (2005) argues that one of the two key questions on social entrepreneurship is how one would recognise a social entrepreneur, a question which has been the subject of relatively few research studies. Many of these have taken a psychological approach, as Simms and Robinson (2009) have done, arguing that the social entrepreneur comprises the activist and the entrepreneur and that it is the balance between the two that informs the organizational structure which the social entrepreneur develops. However, a smaller number of studies are concerned with the sociological construction of identity, exploring answers to the questions of who to be, what to do and how to act (Giddens 1991) and emphasizing the importance of social relations in the creation of the identity of the social entrepreneur (Thompson 1999, Thompson and Bolton 2004, Berglund 2006).