Relevance

A corporate social entrepreneur (CSE) is defined as “an employee of the firm who operates in a socially entrepreneurial manner; identifying opportunities for and/ or championing socially responsible activity; in addition to helping the firm achieve its business targets. The CSE operates regardless of an organizational context that is pre-disposed towards corporate social responsibility (CSR). This is because the CSE is driven by their dominant self-transcendent (concerned with the welfare of others) as opposed to their self-enhancement personal values .Consequently, the CSE does not necessarily have a formal socially responsible job role, nor do they necessarily have to be in a senior management position to progress their socially responsible agenda.”

Corporate Social Entrepreneurship (CSE) is a process aimed at enabling business to develop more advanced and powerful forms of CSR. The CSE Concept emerges from and builds on three other conceptual frameworks: entrepreneurship, corporate entrepreneurship, and social entrepreneurship.

The notion of the CSE primarily relates to the field of corporate social responsibility. It is thus relevant to both practitioners and scholars of business and management and more specifically to the fields of business ethics; organizational behavior; entrepreneurship; human resource management and business strategy. Moreover, the concept is inherently linked with the notion of personal values: in itself, a field of study from sociology; anthropology and social psychology. Furthermore, due to the concept’s associations with ideas about agency, this also means that this topic connects with moral philosophy. Such complexity reflects the inter-disciplinary nature of the field of corporate social responsibility.