Going Global: Exploring the Obstacles for Social Entrepreneurs

Abstract

Social enterprises (SE), firms with mission to enhance the social wealth and the common good are increasingly becoming significant to the socio-economic development of nations. Like conventional small and medium business enterprises, a number of social enterprises aspire to play active role across national borders and having serious constraints to scale through. Though both forms of enterprises participate in global business environment, issues that confront SEs and their internationalisation aspiration is relatively unexplored. This paper seeks to make fresh contributions to the social entrepreneurship literature on the factors confronting social entrepreneurs in their internationalization aspirations. The study is theoretical and adopts positional literature review method. Though similar, it is concluded that the constraints facing SEs are not all together the same with traditional SMEs, but include both internal and external factors such as limited financial resources, difficulty in obtaining reliable foreign representation and human capital inefficiency. Others include government and political risks, procedural constraints, and macro-environmental constraints: political, economic, socio-cultural and technological barriers. By implication, global business operation presents a lot of challenges, the way forward for SEs entails a careful and strategic analysis in order to gain distinctive edge.

Keywords: Social Enterprise, Born-Global, Social Entrepreneurship, Internationalization, Business Environment Constraints.