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Social entrepreneurship, or the use of innovative approaches to tackle social challenges, has emerged throughout the world as a promising solution to grand challenges of our era, such as climate change and social injustice. A survey of 167,793 adults in 58 economies by Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (2016) reveals that 3.2% of the world’s population is engaged in social entrepreneurship activity. The most prominent examples of social entrepreneurship include Grameen Bank that provides small loans to help the poor start businesses and Teach for America that places college graduates to teach in low-income communities. Social ventures, created during the process of social entrepreneurship to tackle social challenges, are nascent organizations that have a great need for legitimacy. Numerous research has showed that legitimacy is critical for new ventures to obtain critical resources (e.g., human, financial, technological) for survival and growth.
Despite the significance of social entrepreneurship for social, human, and economic development, research in social entrepreneurship is still in infancy. To advance theoretical development, this research engages a fundamental research question for social entrepreneurship from a communication perspective: What communicative factors influence social ventures’ legitimacy? Specifically, building on recent research on the connection between social media use and organizational legitimacy, this project will focus on the role of social media in social entrepreneurship. This research will employ a mixed-method three-study approach to investigate the overarching research question guiding this project, including surveys, interviews, and content analysis of organizations’ Twitter data. The best practices identified in this research will help social entrepreneurs and nonprofit leaders more effectively utilize social media to build organizational legitimacy and engage in successful social entrepreneurship to address social challenges.
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