Development of a Scale to Measure the Components of the Social Enterprise Construct

This paper develops a scale to identify the components underlying the construct of social entrepreneurship. The scale was validated using a population of actual social enterprises. The social entrepreneurship components that we identified belong to the groupings of of social innovation, income generation and distribution and participative governance. The six factors in the scale are reinvestment, earned income generation, paid labor, openness, disequilibria and autonomy in operation. By developing this scale we are going beyond the discussion among researchers on the types of social enterprises, by proposing a scale that could be used across spectrum of social enterprises. The unique contribution of this scale is that it takes into consideration the heterogeneity of the concept of social enterprise. The future research possibilities include identification of antecedents and effects of the presence of a particular component in a social enterprise and how it affects the operative process of the social enterprise. Hence this scale will be a valuable tool which could be utilized in advancing the field of research in social entrepreneurship.