Pro-Social Entrepreneurship and Social Impact. A Problematizing Literature Review

Research on social impact in pro-social entrepreneurship has been shaped by implicit assumptions that constrain its conceptual and empirical development. In this paper, we adopt a problematizing literature review, as developed by Alvesson and Sandberg (2020), to critically examine the foundations of social impact research in the field of social and sustainable entrepreneurship. Drawing on perspectives from sociology and anthropology, we identify two dominant assumptions and their consequences for research practices and propose a few new perspectives to the study of social impact in the field of entrepreneurship. First, we highlight that a founder-funder perspective dominates the literature. By adopting this perspective, researchers have prioritized venture and investor views while neglecting the agency of beneficiaries in shaping and experiencing social outcomes. Second, we challenge the predominant treatment of social impact measurement as an objective and neutral process, emphasizing its performative nature—how measurement practices actively shape the outcomes they seek to assess.