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Social entrepreneurship (SE) is a complex phenomenon designed to resolve numerous societal challenges while remaining economically viable. However, how social entrepreneurs in developing countries have deployed digital technologies to address communal challenges during the Covid-19 crisis is largely undocumented. This research examines social entrepreneurs' adoption of digital technologies, the multi-level organisational conditions, and associated innovative outcomes of engaging digital technologies.

Based on the organisational resilience theoretical framework, this research employs a qualitative methodology, comprising 38 semi-structured interviews with Nigerian SE firms, to investigate social entrepreneurs' engagement with digital technologies.

The study’s findings reveal 19 pathways through which digital technologies enabled organisational resilience outcomes by Nigerian SE firms during the Covid-19 pandemic. This allows the authors to show, via a 3 × 3 matrix, how social entrepreneurs deploy digital technologies to build proximate, dynamic, and continuous resilience in a weak institutional context.

The study’s findings enables the authors to advance the SE – digital technologies – resilience scholarship in a developing economy.

In many developing and developed countries, small/medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are a very important part of the economy and are commonly referred to as the lifeblood of the economy. SMEs in Nigeria have contributed around 48% of the national gross domestic product (GDP) in recent times and account for about 17.4 million jobs. Considering how much they contribute to national economies, it is expedient to seek ways in which they can derive value from innovative technologies to further strengthen their position. Web 2.0 technologies and associated social media applications such as social network sites, microblogging, weblogs and similar technologies are known to improve communication and collaboration among employees and customers. SMEs typically have a small budget for branding, advertising and corporate communication. Consequently, social media provides a ready and inexpensive tool that can be used to communicate with customers and for internal communication and collaboration. Several studies in the area of diffusion of innovations to SMEs argue that they do not usually use adopted technologies to its full potential and as such do not add as much value to the business. Extant research on corporate communication using social media focuses on large organizations’ adoption and use of the technology with little focus on SMEs. This contribution aims to fill this gap by considering how SMEs in Nigeria adopt and use social media to improve corporate communication.

This paper examines the effects of non-professionals' involvements in real estate service provision on real estate agency practice in Ibadan Nigeria, in order to provide information that could enhance real estate agency practice in the country.

Data were gathered through questionnaire administration on a total sample of 232 respondents comprising 82 estate surveyors and valuers, 100 non-professional estate agents and 25 real estate agency service consumers each from the respective clients of the two groups. A respondent-driven sampling (RDS) technique was adopted for data collection and was particularly useful in accessing non-professionals with characteristically less identifiable organizational structure. Data were analysed using mean scores on a Likert type scale while Spearman rank correlation was used to compare and establish if significant differences exist between the perceptions of clients of professionals and non-professionals on the services provided.

This study revealed that while the involvement of non-professionals in real estate agency practice deprives professionals of opportunities for legitimate earnings and is attributed to incidences of fraudulent transactions in the market, non-professionals often also serve as facilitators of transactions for the professionals. Hence, there seems to be a symbiotic relationship between the two groups and also a tacit validation of the involvement of the former by the latter.

This work contributes to and extends the body of knowledge on non-professionals' involvement in real estate professional practice by providing insights into the effects of activities of individuals who are not members of the real estate profession on real estate agency professional practice, particularly in the context of an emergent and less transparent market.