Faculty of Business Seminar Series / Çiğdem Asarkaya

Title: Founder’s background as a catalyst for social entrepreneurship

Abstract: Social entrepreneurship has a long history of practice worldwide (Mair and Marti, 2006). However the concept of social entrepreneurship has become widely popular among researchers during the last two decades. The life stories of social entrepreneurs are at the focus of this study. Specifically our purpose is to explore how such people’s background contributes to their decisions to establish their foundations. There are studies investigating social entrepreneur’s skills (Turner and Martin, 2005; Thompson, Alvy and Lees, 2000; Sharir and Lerner, 2006), experience (Sharir and Lerner, 2006; Van der Scheer, 2007), demographics (Alvord, Brown and Letts, 2004), and motives (Sharir and Lerner, 2006). In addition to these, Barendsen and Gardner (2004) examined what distinguishes ‘social’ entrepreneurs from others. Their study shows that many social entrepreneurs have traumatic experience in their early lives. There are numerous studies referring to Barendsen and Gardner (2004); however there are no supporting studies investigating the impact of the background of the founders on the founding decision of such entities. In addition, the case of Turkey is not well analyzed in the social entrepreneurship literature. We think that values of the founders and their social ventures, which are venues for social value-creation, are two sides of the same coin. And we expect that some values are formed due to traumatic experiences, while some others are formed by one’s identification with a role model. This is why we decided to investigate the life stories of social entrepreneurs in this study.

Place : Meeting Room AB2-345