Exploring the crux of social entrepreneurship: The pursuit of blended value creation

How can social enterprises harmonise social and commercial value logics? This thesis examines the challenge that social enterprises face to create social and commercial value in an integrated, complementary and harmonious manner. Preliminary research has highlighted that efforts to harmonise these two seemingly opposing value sets, referred to in this thesis as Blended Value Creation (BVC), are on the rise. However, while preliminary research highlights an increased interest in BVC, it also highlights that respective research efforts remain conceptual, scattered and lack consensus. In an attempt to contribute to the study of BVC, this thesis starts by examining and clustering existing works within the social entrepreneurship research domain that discuss BVC within the last fifteen years (see chapter 2). This examination has led to a more synthesised overview of BVC, thus contributing to social enterprise management theory. Having examined BVC from existing theory (in chapter 2), this thesis goes on to contribute to a more applied understanding of BVC by examining four cases of social enterprises in Bangladesh using a grounded theory approach (see chapter 3, 4 and 5). In-depth interviews were conducted with 4 social entrepreneurs for 4 months. Respective field data has helped to further explore the social entrepreneurship process through the lens of organisational identity theory and legitimacy theory. Research has contributed in a number of ways to the social entrepreneurship research domain. Firstly, it proposes a seven-themed framework to aid social enterprises in efforts to embed BVC in their management practices. Secondly, through the application of organisational identity theory, new findings have been unearthed regarding stakeholder management practices for social enterprises. Furthermore, by applying legitimacy theory, this thesis provides novel insights into the relationships that social enterprises form with non-governmental organisations to enhance BVC. Most significantly however, research for this thesis has furthered existing research efforts to understanding a pivotal management challenge for the social entrepreneurship process; harmonising social and commercial value.