Bricolage and Social Entrepreneurship to Address Emergent Social Needs: A “Deconstructionist” Perspective

Abstract

Social entrepreneurship is one of the most discussed issues in recent management literature. In partcular, social entrepreneurship has recently gained the atenton of management scholars interested in understanding its sociological and anthropological aspects. This paper focuses on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s noton of “bricolage” and the way it can represent a signifcant opportunity to address emergent social needs. Building on a postmodernist philosophical perspectve, namely Jacques Derrida’s “deconstructonism,” we atempt to unpack the bricolage phenomenon within the social entrepreneurship feld. Following the fndings of an in-depth longitudinal case study, we provide a theoretcal conceptualizaton of possible entrepreneurial solutons to social needs, exploring the signifcant role of bricolage that is consequently interpreted as a suitable entrepreneurial opportunity to address partcular types of social needs that we shall defne, in a way, as emergent.

Keywords

• social entrepreneurship
• bricolage
• non-proft organizatons
• deconstructonism
• complexity
• emergencies management