Timmons' Framework

Crucial Resource Acquisition

The resource-based view holds that key entrepreneurial resources play an important role in the creation, survival and development of new enterprises . There is a need to promote resource support and maintain resource flow at all stages. Therefore, social entrepreneurship process research is to answer the question of how entrepreneurs gain legitimacy and resources. They advocate the social value proposition through opportunity identification, organization construction and influencing other members of society. This major mission of creating social values often forces them to give up all or part of their economic benefits, resulting in more prominent and complex challenges in obtaining resources.

In terms of financial capital, the capital structure plays a key role in the survival and development of enterprises. From the internal point of view, the realization of social goals requires long-term investment. Social entrepreneurs are more far-sighted than commercial entrepreneurs. Based on pro-social cost-benefit analysis, they are reluctant to subordinate the long-term non-financial goals of social enterprises (such as social and environmental goals) to financial necessities that require strict on-time debt payments. And social entrepreneurs pay less attention to how to analyze and adjust the organizational capital structure than traditional entrepreneurs. From the external point of view, evaluators (especially financial institutions) often underestimate the legitimacy of social enterprises and overestimate their investment risks as social enterprises do not conform to the traditional organizational categories. They ignore the long-term social value and economic benefits that social activities bring. For the above reasons, the capital structure of social enterprises would contain less debt financing than commercial enterprises in the long run, and its initial leverage ratio also has a greater impact on future leverage ratio than commercial enterprises.

Human capital is the basis to support entrepreneurs to make correct entrepreneurial choices and effectively implement entrepreneurial activities. It is the personal ability formed by individuals due to their knowledge, education, experience and other characteristics reflecting production value in the working environment. Therefore, one of the focuses of social entrepreneurship is to build human capital. The members of social enterprise pay more attention to job satisfaction and quality of life than their economic benefits. They also value the quality and content of work more than others in commercial enterprises. Therefore, social organizations have more inherent advantages in attracting and retaining talents and striving for voluntary labor. In addition, some social enterprises are also committed to enhancing human capital and building capabilities that benefit both individuals and communities. For example, as a social venture capital company located in rural China, Sowers Action has transformed the huge population burden into intellectual and productive resources by developing new skills. There are similar organizations in Europe, namely, Work Integration Social Enterprises (WISEs), which provide training to vulnerable groups (such as the disabled) to help them enter the labor market and achieve self-reliance. By providing skills training, expanding formal education, and arranging management experience sharing, social enterprises can increase their access to self-sufficient entrepreneurial practices and increase the human capital of the organization itself and society.

Other studies have also begun to analyze how social entrepreneurs successfully use their identities and skills to get conventional resources. For example, Wry and York propose that social entrepreneurs with unique roles and identity face different opportunities and restrictions when combining business and social welfare logic, thus being more variable in designing new models and catalyzing the flow of supportive resources. When initiating fundamental changes, the identity of social entrepreneurs is not only the identity of entrepreneurs, but also their structural status in a field that enables them to access decentralized resources across different stakeholders. And social entrepreneurs with strong social skills and effective interaction with resource providers can further improve their success rate in obtaining resources.

Social entrepreneurship is a means to alleviate social problems. Most studies still emphasize the acquisition and provision of entrepreneurial resources, but ignore other more valuable forms of support, including the establishment of an entrepreneurial ecosystem. This ecosystem involves interactions between multiple actors (such as customers, investors, NGOs, and governments) that effectively facilitate the flow and sharing of resources. Some studies have begun to explore the process of establishing the ecosystem. In the future, we can deeply analyze how the interaction mechanism between internal and external members of the system can effectively stimulate innovation and promote entrepreneurship growth. Regarding the acquisition of resources, there are still two omissions in the existing research. First, although the acquisition of resources involves the suppliers and demanders, researchers pay more attention to social enterprises (demanders of resources) and ignore the different resource suppliers. For example, the different values and expectations of providers affect their decision-making logic and determine the effectiveness of social enterprise access to resources . Second, the existing research on social enterprises' access to resources lacks large-scale sample analysis and comparative analysis and is mostly concentrated in a single country. Although portraying social entrepreneurs as heroes who change society can deeply analyze specific social problems, over-reliance on symbolic personal stories limit researchers' insight across research backgrounds, making it difficult for them to grasp the institutional complexity of transnational research. Therefore, the introduction of cross-country comparisons for is valuable for understanding the various institutional conditions in which it is generated, operated and developed.

Establishment of Legitimacy of Social Entrepreneurship

As a typical "hybrid organization", social enterprises have a complex relationship with many stakeholders because of their dual missions with certain conflicting relationships . They face greater obstacles to survival and severe challenges of inherent lack of legitimacy. Therefore, to win the acceptance and recognition of the identity of members of society, social organizations must cross the threshold of legitimacy and embed in the social environment through a series of legality strategies. Many researchers have actively explored the legitimacy of new ventures in combination with institutional theory, resource-based view, and entrepreneurial behavior perspective.

Institutional researchers believe that legitimacy is an acceptable and legitimate organizational behavior within certain social structure standards, values, beliefs and definition systems. From the perspective of stakeholders, legitimacy is their acceptance of organizational behavior. Different researchers have made different classifications of social legitimacy, including regulatory, normative and cognitive legitimacy, practical legitimacy and moral legitimacy, market legitimacy, investment legitimacy, relationship legitimacy, social legitimacy and alliance legitimacy. Organizations can acquire legitimacy by complying with social systems, social norms and social expectations. Meyer et al.  indicate that an organization can form a normative structure of legitimacy through the system of generating internal isomorphic behavior, thereby maintaining its isomorphism with its institutional environment and maximizing legitimacy. Maggio and Powell  further propose three institutional isomorphic pressures - mandatory isomorphism, simulated isomorphism, and normative isomorphism - that demonstrate the homogenization of organizations in the process of seeking legitimacy. However, due to the lack of clear normative logic, social entrepreneurship shows particularity in obtaining organizational legitimacy. Therefore, Morgan put forward another pressure-reflexive isomorphism during the process of social entrepreneur paradigm construction, constituting the four major strategies to legalize the acquisition of social organizations. Institutional researchers believe that the new organization acquires legitimacy through homogenization behavior across social regulation, norms and cognitive barriers. The legitimacy strategy is more inclined to the passive and obedience strategy of institutional embedding. However, social entrepreneurs need to influence the existing institutional arrangements through active institutional entrepreneurship. They create new institutional logic, promote the transformation of social mechanisms, thus becoming the key to establish or rebuild value creation activities.

From a resource perspective, legitimacy is seen as a tool for organizations to access external resources. Social enterprises use market-oriented means to solve social problems and realize sustainable development by providing products or services (such as micro-credit for the poor and employment for the disabled) that are lacking in the current social background to the market. This feature makes social enterprises different from commercial enterprises, greatly restricted in the collection of resources. Combined with the research of system and resource dependence theory, it is pointed out that when facing the institutional controls and market uncertainty, organizations can adopt five strategies to obtain legitimacy, including acquiescence, compromise, avoidance, resistance and manipulation. The choice of strategies of different strategies directly affects the behavior practice of organizations in seeking legitimacy. Suchman condenses it into three types of legality strategies, namely compliance, selection and manipulation. Zimmerman and Zeitz  further complement the creative strategy and pointed out that these four legality strategies are differentiated according to the extent to which the organization changes external factors. According to the order of compliance, selection, manipulation and creation, compliance strategy has the smallest change to external environment elements, while creation strategy has the largest change.

There are also many scholars from the perspective of behavior to explore social entrepreneurship resources acquisition strategy. Ahlstrom and Bruton point out that organizations can obtain different organizational legitimacy through nine ways, including establishing government ties, charitable activities, making contributions to the local community, building inter-enterprise alliances, and obtaining certification. Other studies have also found that material strategy, discourse strategy and organizational strategy are also effective to obtain legitimacy. As far as social entrepreneurship organizations are concerned, meta-narrative and rhetorical devices are effective micro-behavioral strategies to obtain legitimacy, mainly involving emotional images, metaphors, analogies and expressions. For example, Ruebottom finds through case studies that social entrepreneurs make good use of rhetoric strategies to achieve the consistency of innovation and system, thus obtaining legitimacy. In addition, some researchers discuss the role of language and communication in promoting access to resources. They record the use of language-based strategies in social activities (such as telling stories and using personal relationships), then find that these strategies help social enterprises quickly establish familiarity with potential partners and convince them of the potential value of social undertakings. The interaction between process participants (entrepreneurs, government agencies, and other stakeholders) also opens up new ideas for social organizations to gain external legitimacy. Other research results stem from Molceck et al. pioneering the introduction of bricolage in the field of entrepreneurship into social entrepreneurship. They put forward the new concept of social bricolage and expand the three brand-new composition structures of social value creation, stakeholder participation and persuasion. The bricolage perspective promotes social enterprises to realize their social mission by designing creative uses, reusing and acquiring underestimated, idle or discarded resources, but there is still a limitation that not all resources can be bypassed or replaced.

All three perspectives show that the strategy of social entrepreneurs to obtain legitimacy is not only passively adapting, but also actively striving for expanding the survival and development space of social organizations. Although the research on legality has made great progress, it still has the following shortcomings. First, researchers still concentrate in the field of traditional entrepreneurship, and there is a lack of research on the acquisition mechanism of social entrepreneurship legitimacy. Second, although the existing research attaches importance to the role of legitimacy in the process of social entrepreneurship, it has not yet explored the mechanism of different types of legitimacy strategies. Specially, it is important to study the relationship between legality and social entrepreneurship growth from a dynamic perspective. Therefore, the construction path of social enterprise legitimacy still needs to be revealed, and the relevant theoretical "gap" still needs to be filled. In addition, in the future, we should further explore the internal mechanism of promoting the expansion of social enterprises' economic scale and the realization of social values, thus revealing the growth mechanism of social entrepreneurs.