Antecedents of women’s social entrepreneurship: values development and the perceived desirability and feasibility of social venture creation

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to identify the values antecedents of women’s social entrepreneurship. It explores where and how these values emerge and how they underpin the perceived desirability and feasibility of social venture creation.

Design/methodology/approach

Values development across the life-course is interrogated through retrospective sense-making by thirty UK-based women social entrepreneurs.

Findings

The findings express values related to empathy, social justice and action-taking, developed, consolidated and challenged in a variety of experiential domains over time. The cumulative effects of these processes result in the perceived desirability and feasibility of social entrepreneurial venture creation as a means of effecting social change and achieving coherence between personal values and paid work, prompting social entrepreneurial action-taking.

Originality/value

This paper offers novel, contextualised insights into the role that personal values play as antecedents to social entrepreneurship. It contributes to the sparse literature focussed on both women’s experiences of social entrepreneurship generally, and on their personal values specifically.

Citation

de Magdalene, P. (2024), "Antecedents of women’s social entrepreneurship: values development and the perceived desirability and feasibility of social venture creation", International Journal of Gender and Entrepreneurship, Vol. 16 No. 1, pp. 7-26. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJGE-03-2023-0072