Unraveling the Role of Culture in Social Entrepreneurial Ecosystems

This study explores the role of culture in shaping social entrepreneurship ecosystems with a lens of context dependent framework on culture. While ecosystems have been studied in terms of actors, networks, and resources, the cultural layer remains understudied. Responding to the lack of in-depth, culturally informed analysis beyond broad syntheses in literature on the topic, this study sheds light on national social-enterprise ecosystems through Abramson’s context-dependent model to show how locally embedded values, meanings, resources and motivations shape, and are in turn shaped by entrepreneurial ecosystem dynamics, thus extending existing theory. A qualitative content analysis is used to analyze four EU social enterprise ecosystem country reports in terms of how they describe cultural meanings, resources and motivations in the country’s social enterprise ecosystem. The findings shed light on which cultural elements are emphasized within social entrepreneurship ecosystems across different country contexts. Through cross-analysis, four thematic categories are identified, describing cultural elements emphasized in the country’s social enterprise ecosystems, welfare and institutional models, history of cooperatives, associations, perceptions of entrepreneurship, the role of institutions and the overlapping category of values and norms. This study argues culture in social entrepreneurial ecosystems should be studied viewing culture as an overarching and inseparable dimension, from a more heuristic point of view. The key themes that emerge from the study are the role of welfare systems, perceptions of entrepreneurship, institutions and values. These themes function as symbolic carriers of cultural meanings in social entrepreneurial ecosystems.