Would For-profit benefit rather than destroy Non-profit? Balance in China’s Social Entrepreneurship Management

Abstract

Theory and practice of social entrepreneurship are both growing rapidly and attracting increasing attention from a number of different domains, such as non-profits, for-profits, and the public sectors. Social entrepreneurship differs from traditional understanding of business entrepreneurship or non-profit organizations. Social entrepreneurs face barriers to achieve success both in business and social sector which get into more challenges. Facing social entrepreneurship failures, first, we isolated for-profit and non-profit compositions to better our understanding of internal processes. Then the primary question is whether for-profit activities would benefit non-profit or destroy the social purpose. We established a hypotheses framework by case studies which identified three tensions between for-profit and non-profit: T1. Ambidexterity: Differentiation or Integration; T2. Resource Allocation: Short-term versus Long-term; T3. Social Changes: Stability versus Adaptability. In this article, three identified tensions from social entrepreneurship practice would give theoretical structure to public field and increase better performance.

Keywords: Social Entrepreneurship/Enterprise, Balance Tensions, Non-profit Management