Social and economic proclivity of social entrepreneurs : dimensions, measurement and validation

Social entrepreneurs are argued to adhere to a ‘dominant social goal’, using revenue streams from the market as a means to support their mission.. However, the extent to which social entrepreneurs actually adhere to socially or economically oriented goals is largely treated as a black box in the literature. This paper develops and validates measures for gaining insight in the relative importance of the “social” and “economic” proclivity of social entrepreneurs, conceptualizing them as two aggregated constructs with three dimensions: work values, organizational identity, and responsibility. The paper validates the theoretically developed constructs and dimension in a well defined sample of social ventures, performing higher order confirmatory factor analysis (N~270).