Social Entrepreneurship as Institutional-Change Work: A Corpus Linguistics Analysis

TLDR: This article applied corpus linguistics (CL) to identify the institutional change work performed by social entrepreneurs and found 17 discourse orientations (i.e., problem, difficulty, empowerment, beneficiary, altruistic, social process, economic, opportunity, sustainability, partnership, resource, solution, government as enabler, social business identity, change-making, mission, and impact) that can be aggregated into five meta discourses: problematization, empowerment and marketization, resource mo...

Abstract: How do social entrepreneurs employ language to bring about a change in the structure of society and institutions? Drawing on discourse as the main epistemology in institutional theory, this research applies corpus linguistics (CL) – a relatively new approach in studying discourse – to identify the institutional-change work performed by social entrepreneurs. By applying CL on a small, specialized corpus of a Chinese social enterprise (SE) that offers taxi services to a specialty market – elders and physically disabled residents – and has institutionalized wheelchair accessible transportation in Hong Kong (China), this research found 17 discourse orientations (i.e., problem, difficulty, empowerment, beneficiary, altruistic, social process, economic, opportunity, sustainability, partnership, resource, solution, government-as-enabler, social business identity, change-making, mission, and impact) that can be aggregated into five meta discourses: problematization, empowerment, marketization, resource mo...