Social Entrepreneurship Activities in the Tourism Sector: Bibliometric Analysis and Social Network Analysis

Introduction

The entrepreneur is one of the production factors and is defined by Schumpeter as “the person who sets up a company to produce a new product or to produce an existing product in a new method”. Marx, on the other hand, emphasizes the aim of the entrepreneur to make profit, and for this purpose, he states that the entrepreneur acts with the motive of constantly following innovations, improving and developing the existing, which is the basis of social change. Although they define the entrepreneur from different angles, both Schumpeter and Marx emphasized the importance of entrepreneurship in order to create innovations and therefore they argued that entrepreneurs should be protected, promoted and encouraged (cited in Tiryaki, 2012: 14-16).

There are three main dimensions of entrepreneurial activity that the entrepreneur carries out with the aim of making a profit or bringing an innovation: Innovation, risk taking and proactivity (Morris, Avila & Allen, 1993). Combinations of these dimensions in different proportions have led to the emergence of many different types of entrepreneurship such as opportunity entrepreneurship, innovative entrepreneurship, follower entrepreneurship (Tekin, 2009: 3-4), internal entrepreneurship (Pinchot, 1985: 4), green entrepreneurship (Berchicci, 2009: 1), and virtual entrepreneurship (Chandra & Leenders, 2012). Social entrepreneurship, which deals with entrepreneurship socially, is one of these new entrepreneurship types. Austin, Stevenson and Wei-Skillern (2006) define social entrepreneurship as “an innovative, social value creation activity that can take place in non-profit organizations, the private sector or the public sector”. It is stated that the concept of corporate social responsibility was first used in Bowen's book Social Responsibilities of the Businessman published in 1953 (Aktan & Börü, 2007: 2). The concept of social entrepreneurship has emerged with the merger of corporate social responsibility and entrepreneurship. Studies on social entrepreneurship, whose main purpose is to create social value and for which entrepreneurs generally do not act with the aim of making a profit (Abu Saifan, 2012: 23), are increasing day by day. Studies in which social enterprise and social entrepreneurship are tried to be defined in different ways (Dees, 1998; Mort, Weerawardena & Carnegie, 2002; Roper & Cheney, 2005; Martin and Osberg, 2007), Catford's (1998) study emphasizing the necessity of a suitable environment for the development of social entrepreneurs, article of Barki et al. (2015) in which they examine social entrepreneurship retrospectively and prospectively, articles and reports examining social entrepreneurship activities in different countries and regions (Kerlin, 2006; Bulsara, Gandhi & Chandwani, 2015; Wulleman and Hudon, 2015; İnci, 2016) are a few examples of studies conducted on social entrepreneurship. Studies dealing with social entrepreneurship efforts in different sectors are also included in the literature (Souitaris and Zerbinati, 2005; Ziegler et al., 2014; Loosemore, 2015). Tourism is one of the sectors subject to social entrepreneurship studies. The intersection point of these two concepts is that social entrepreneurship aims to create social value and tourism has a positive effect on social welfare. This intersection set, called tourism social entrepreneurship, is described by Sheldon, Pollock, and Daniele (2017: 7) as: “A process that uses tourism to create innovative solutions to immediate social, environmental and economic problems in destinations by mobilizing the ideas, capacities, resources and social agreements, from within or outside the destination, required for its sustainable social transformation”.