The Seven Entrepreneurial Activities Model and Social Entrepreneurship: The Case of Sole Mission

Abstract

Can a credible prescriptive model for the creation of new social enterprise organizations be developed? This dissertation explored that question by examining the appropriateness of Bisel and Bisel’s (2023) Seven Entrepreneurial Activities (SEA) model for explaining the origination and maintenance of volunteer and donor dependent nonprofit organization (VDDN). While the SEA model was developed to explain the constitution of new for-profit organizations, VDDN are nonprofit entities that realize value propositions via the labor of non-employee volunteers and external financial benefactors, and, therefore, may involve constitutive activities that are distinct from for-profit organizing. A case study of a social entrepreneurial endeavor (i.e., Sole Mission) was conducted, including ethnographic observations and in-depth semi-structured interviews with organizational stakeholders. Sole Mission is a 16-year-old VDDN that provides new, fitted, and appropriate socks and shoes to impoverished American children. Utilizing organizational documents and interview data, an organizational life history was constructed to identify social entrepreneurship (SE) practices, which occurred during the organization’s origin as well as maintenance and reproduction phases. Analysis identified three entrepreneurial practices from the VDDN’s origin phase (0-2 years) and two from the maintenance and reproduction phase (3-16 years). Further analysis of the organizational life history was used to assess whether SEA model activities were apparent. On one hand, analysis revealed the presence of all three SEA model higher order sets in both phases of organizational life. On the other hand, three exigency-based divergences were also observed in relation to the VDDN: (a) affinity opportunities, (b) volunteers not employees, and (c) donors not investors. Taken together, these finding extend organizational communication theory, including communication constitutes organization (CCO) theory, the four flows model, and SEA model. Furthermore, this research contributes to the body of literature on social entrepreneurship. Ultimately, by adding a description of contextually-based divergences, the SEA model is an efficacious prescriptive communication-based model for explaining the constitution of new volunteer and donor dependent nonprofit organization.