One boundary in two traces: concept vocabulary and cited references in base- of-the-pyramid, social enterprise and social entrepreneurship research, 2000 to 2025

Abstract Research on market-based approaches to poverty centres on a small set of labels, including base of the pyramid, social enterprise, social entrepreneurship and inclusive business. Whether these labels index distinct bodies of work has consequences for how evidence is assembled and used. This study examines 554 journal articles published between 2000 and 2025, of which 461 carry at least one label, and compares the labels on two traces of scholarly organisation: the indexed concept vocabulary attached to each paper, and the prior work each paper cites. Both traces are tested against the same permutation null, generated by reassigning the corpus's own labels at random. The same boundary appears on both. Base-of-the-pyramid research is separated from social enterprise and social entrepreneurship research on vocabulary and on cited references alike, and in both cases the separation exceeds chance after correction across the six-pair family. The boundary is deeper on citations: overlap across it falls to 44 per cent of the within-pair value for cited references, against 61 per cent for vocabulary. Social enterprise and social entrepreneurship are not separated on either trace, which is a non-detection and does not establish their equivalence. A bibliographic coupling network is substantially modular under the same separation, but does not identify a unique placement for inclusive business, whose pools are too small for comparable inference. Findings describe indexing and citation behaviour in the analysed corpus, not the conceptual content of the constructs. JEL Classification I32; L26; L31; M14; O35