A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN THE BRAZILIAN MACRO REGIONS

Abstract

Social entrepreneurship (SE) emerged by creating business models towards social development through efficient solutions that can culminate in processes of social transformation. Face that, this research aimed to perform a comparative analysis of social entrepreneurship’s dimensions in the Brazilian regions to verify their variations along with the country. The categories of analysis used were opportunities, innovation, self-management, economic value, social value, and sustainable development. The study used secondary data based on information of 19,708 solidarity economic enterprises (SEE) collected in 2013 and 21,859 SEE in 2007. The research was applied with a quantitative approach. Data analysis was through descriptive statistics. Among the main results, it was verified that the Social Value and Innovation dimensions presented the highest levels among the categories of study, however, both had a percentage reduction in the analyzed period, along with Social Development and Economic Value. Only the Opportunity and Self-management dimensions showed a positive evolution. The findings indicated that in the Brazilian SEE, the perspective of the social value oriented towards economic value prevails. Also, the Brazilian SEE have characteristics inherent to the School of social entrepreneurship of the developing countries, i.e., they are motivated by the community development, opportunities and alternative to the unemployment, therefore, the balance proposed by the triple bottom line is not achieved. Besides, an overview based on the analyzed dimensions indicated that the Brazilian SEE are not consolidating.