Concept
A Corporate Social Entrepreneur (CSE) is someone who attempts to advance a social agenda in addition to a formal job role as part of a corporation. It is possible for CSEs to work in organizational contexts that are favourable to corporate social responsibility but this is not always the case. CSEs focus on developing both social capital and economic capital, and their formal job role may not always align with corporate social responsibility. Furthermore, a person in a non-executive or managerial position can still be considered a CSE. CSE is a multi-disciplinary scientifical sub-field, relating to the fields of corporate social responsibility and sustainability. It has relevance in the context of business and management, specifically in areas such as business ethics, sustainability, organizational behavior, entrepreneurship, human resource management and business strategy. The concept has intersections with sociology, anthropology and social psychology and philosophy. CSE was initially described in 2002, in a theoretical working paper published in the Hull University Business School Research Memoranda Series. The paper argued that personal values could also motivate CSR (and by extension, sustainability), along with more apparent economic and macro-political drivers. This reflected the traditional business ethics and philosophical debate on moral agency. The paper was then followed by a UK conference paper, published the following year in the Journal of Business Ethics, which discussed the significance of managerial discretion in CSR. The term "corporate social entrepreneur" was first used in a paper presented during the 17th Annual European Business Ethics Network Conference held in June 2004. TThe term "corporate social entrepreneur" was defined and distinguished from other types of entrepreneurs such as the executive entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs (Pinchot, 1985), the policy entrepreneur, and the public or social entrepreneur. (See also Austin et al., 2006a for a description of the similarities and differences between commercial and social entrepreneurship).