Entrepreneurship and Social Change Special Interest Group
Acronym: SocChangeSIG
Short content and objectives
Entrepreneurship can act as a force of social change and emancipation by creating social value, also through alternative heterotopic forms of organizations. It has been increasingly viewed as central to achieving socio-economic progress, addressing ‘grand challenges’ of our time, and building a better world. In turn, scholars have also stressed that entrepreneurship can function as a pervasive ideology that can alter the fabric of society through several adverse effects – for example, by increasing competition and inequalities, diffusing an idealized vision of entrepreneurial agency that actually prevents entrepreneurial endeavors, and enhancing negative externalities. We see entrepreneurship as a socially embedded activity and organization-creation taking different forms in different places, ecosystems, or cultures, and holding the potential to contextually shape how value is produced or destroyed. Taking entrepreneurship as a multidimensional phenomenon, we aim to have this SIG as a platform to interrogate and explore the value of entrepreneurship for society to orientate the conversation towards how entrepreneurship creates social change in society – both positive and negative.
SocChangeSIG objectives are:
- to bring scholars together to understand the ways and conditions that entrepreneurship can create and destroy social value and thereby act as a force for positive or negative social change,
- to adopt a future-oriented perspective, and embrace new theories, business models and organizational paradigms that emerge in the entrepreneurial scene (e.g. post-growth, post-capitalism, post-human, alternative organizing),
- to engage in a conversation between critical and a-critical approaches as well as past- and future-oriented perspectives, to question and possibly recalibrate our dominant theories and frameworks to further explore the – positive and negative – value of entrepreneurship on and for society,
- to rethink the role of entrepreneurship to envision promising ways to deal with grand challenges.
Planned activities
- SocChangeSIG plans to organise various academic events and activities over the next three years:
- Regular thematic seminars (online and in person)
- Paper development workshops
- LinkedIn Group connecting members and non-members around social change and entrepreneurship
- Special Issue proposals to various journals
- PDW at the RENT conference
- AGM for the SIG during the RENT conference
Leadership and membership
Co-chair: Claire Champenois (Audencia Business School, France)
Professor Claire Champenois is a long-standing participant in and contributor to the RENT Conference. She is a Full Professor of Entrepreneurship at Audencia Business School. Claire is an expert in socialized (“embedded”) approaches to entrepreneurship, including entrepreneurship-as-practice, which she has applied to different topics (entrepreneur-investor relationship, conflict management, academic entrepreneurship, heterotopia creation). She was the director of the Institute for Entrepreneurship between 2009 and 2016 and acted as department head of research between 2017 and 2020. She currently serves as associate editor of the Review of Entrepreneurship and as editorial review board member of Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice. (Email: cchampenois@audencia.com)
Co-chair: Sibel Ozasir Kacar (Nijmegen School of Management, The Netherlands)
Sibel Ozasir Kacar is a long-standing participant in and contributor to the RENT conference. She is an Assistant Professor at the Nijmegen School of Management, the Netherlands. Her research focuses on entrepreneurship and context, minority entrepreneurship, and critical analysis of entrepreneurial policies, structural environment and entrepreneurial ecosystems. She acted as the chair lead of Early Career Researchers (ECR) at ISBE (Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship) and now takes place in the editorial reviewer board of Entrepreneurship and Regional Development (ERD), International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour and Research (IJEBR) and Gender and Organisation. (Email: sibel.ozasirkacar@ru.nl)
The SocChangeSIG Committee
Claire Champenois, Audencia Business School, France
Sibel Ozasir Kacar, Nijmegen School of Management, The Netherlands
Frank Janssen, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium
Steffen Korsgaard, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark
Verena Meyer, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany
Kathleen Randerson, Audencia Business School, France
Julita Wasilczuk, Gdansk University of Technology, Poland
Current SocChangeSIG members
The list of current SIG members will be updated later by the chair of the SIG and will be sent to all members of the SIG.
How to become a member of the Entrepreneurship and Social Change Special Interest Group (SocChangeSIG)?
Entrepreneurship and Social Change Special Interest Group (SocChangeSIG) of the ECSB welcomes both ECSB members and non-members. Joining the future activities of the SIG requires a valid ECSB membership. If you do not have a valid membership, you have 9 months to register as an ECSB member. This can be done at https://ecsb.org/join-ecsb/. You can also join the ECSB by attending the RENT or 3E conferences.
If you are interested in being a member of the SocChangeSIG please fill in the online form via the link below: