Social Entrepreneurship Research in the Greater China Region: A Scoping Review and New Research Framework

Increasing attention is being paid to the practice of social entrepreneurship in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, or so-called the Greater China Region. Despite the growing popularity of SE as a field of inquiry in the Region, there has been no attempt to appraise the state of the art of the intellectual development of SE scholarship in the Region. In this article, we conducted a scoping review and critically analyzed 46 peer-reviewed articles published on SE in the Greater China that were sourced from Web of Science and Google Scholar. Overall, we found that the Chinese SE scholarship lacks novelty, focuses on what is already “obvious” to the mainstream SE scholarship, and follows the similar “style and taste” of SE research in the West. As a remedy, we propose a new framework for Chinese SE research by broadening the scope of SE, localizing theoretical lenses and concepts, exploring new contexts, and re-tooling and reskilling. We call upon SE
scholars to pursue more out-of-the-box, original, and daring research to contribute to and engage in meaningful conversation with the mainstream SE scholarship.