Over the recent years, social entrepreneurship has gained popularity, as new opportunities emerge in the changing societal trends. According to Bornstein (21), many organizations and individuals’ perceptions on socially-oriented ventures are changing significantly, as the need for social facilities increase with regard to the increasing globalization.
Organizations are currently organizing for awards and other attractive awards for successful entrepreneurs who venture into the social sector to resolve eminent problems facing the society or a section of the society. For instance, Manhattan Institute Award (MIA) is one of the recently established organizations which awards social entrepreneurs who establish new ventures to solve various pressing problems among the people.
As revealed by Trevis and Toyah (2), social entrepreneurship is currently taking a new form, where unique ventures are being established with regard to the changing needs of the contemporary global society. This paper will discuss the major key issues emerging in the social entrepreneurship with respect to the changing societal needs and preferences.
As revealed by Trevis and Toyah (2), social entrepreneurship is expanding vastly both in the academic and business sectors. With the increasing globalization across nations, the need for increased literacy among the people has been increasing significantly.
Particularly, many social organizations are being established to offer educational opportunities to the poor and orphaned children with an aim of developing literate future generations. For instance, in the year 2008, Fast Company was acknowledged Better World Books and Organization due to its efforts to address global illiteracies by giving book donations among schools in less developed countries.
As reported by Bornstein (25), the framework of contemporary social entrepreneurship is largely embedded on the emerging global problems and calamities, with respect to the increasing globalization among nations.
With the changing climatic conditions, there has been rising need for social entrepreneurship to integrate some elements of business. Since natural resources are declining significantly, most of the innovations in the business sector are seeking sustainability and efficiency in resources usage.
On this basis, environmental management has become a very important area of consideration among businesses to facilitate sustainability in their production processes. As it revealed by Trevis and Toyah (4), dematerialization and value chain management are becoming the core areas of consideration among contemporary organizations in the social sector.
For instance, World Vision is one of the contemporary social organizations creating awareness among organizations to facilitate sustainability and efficiency in resources management. As a result, many organizations in the industrial sector have been made aware of the basic ways to facilitate efficiency and sustainability in resources use to enhance better performance both in the short-run and the long-run.
As noted by Bornstein (31), many social entrepreneurs are getting closely engaged to sustainability practices as a result of the many organizations creating awareness on the importance of proper resources utilization. For example, dematerialization has lately been revealed as one of the most effective strategies to facilitate sustainability in the process of environmental management.
This practice dematerialization has been largely advocated by World Economic Forum among contemporary firms and corporations to facilitate efficient resources use. Since social entrepreneurial opportunities are geared towards the development of social welfare in all aspects, the currently threatening climatic change has facilitated the development of many social entrepreneurial organizations.
As a result, many social problems brought by the prevalent social calamities are finding their solutions easier, since many organizations are being established to deal with such problems.
According to Bornstein (39), innovative and creativity have been largely facilitated by the massive development of the social entrepreneurship. It is important to note that, contemporary social entrepreneurship is playing a very significant role in applying the new technology to create social welfare.
As reported by Trevis and Toyah (3), social entrepreneurs are becoming significant innovators since their role as societal change agents have remained quite significant. With the world becoming more dynamic and closer through sophisticated information system, it has been easier for new inventions and innovations to reach the global society.
For instance, new techniques of conserving the environment are being easily conveyed through the media by global environmental organizations. Particularly, effective environmental strategies through innovations and creative ways have easily been relayed to the global society to enhance sustainability.
On this basis, social entrepreneurship has become more significant and effective with the advancement of the information systems, which enhances easy transmission of the information being relayed.
Since most of social entrepreneurial opportunities require highly skilled human resources for effective performance. According to Trevis and Toyah (5), since many social entrepreneurs are volunteers; creation of effective social employees capable of creating social value has been an eminent issue.
Particularly, to find employees with innate motives and capable of withstanding low income status for long has remained an eminent issue, as the cost of life gears up as a result of the global financial crisis. With the rise of social needs across the society, many social entrepreneurs have been faced with various challenges of managing complexity in the social needs.
With the consideration of the increasing natural calamities, social entrepreneurs are faced with a challenge of coping with large number of rising needs from the society. This crisis has largely been attributed to poor internal governance among many organizations in the social entrepreneurship.
Though social entrepreneurship has gained popularity in various fields due to it innovative and social venture there has been raising need and concern over its performance. According to Bornstein (47), many organizations in the social entrepreneurship are facing management problems of the funds they get from donors to facilitate their operations.
Most organizations have been found to be having the problem of low financial sustainability due to various anomalies done by the executives. This has weakened the financial system of these non-profit organizations, making them more susceptible to employee lay-offs.
Most of the financial resources are inadequately managed with less regard on self sustainability. As a result, most of the anticipated projects end being supplemented with external resources. The inability of the management in many of the non-governmental organizations has resulted into unnecessary procurement of funds allocated to other future projects.
The governing bodies in most of the contemporary organizations in social entrepreneurship sector have been found to be ineffective, especially in achieving their set goals. Since most of the activities done by these organizations are poorly done, many of the anticipated objectives and goals are not achieved. As it has been revealed, the top executives conduct themselves poorly, since no action can be taken on them.
In most cases, meeting schedules are prepared, but none of them take place in actual sense. As a result, most of the activities are poorly governed, resulting into a high degree of inefficiency in the entire organization. This forms a basis for the lack of coordination of the various departments among many these organizations, resulting into incoherence in the ultimate performance of most of these organizations (Bornstein 45).
In many non-profit-oriented organizations, most of the activities and time are poorly managed; since they often drift out of the laid rules. Job security among the employees is weak, which renders them inefficient in their operations. It is important to note that, job security acts as motivating agent to the employees Ankara (1).
On this basis, therefore, the poor institutional management in many of these has been found to impact a lot in their overall efficiency. More so, the high levels of employee inefficiency have been attributed to the high tendency of employee attrition as a result of poor institutional management. This has been one of the main problems which have led to constraints in the funding of the non-profit organizations.
Conclusion
With the current world becoming highly dynamic, social entrepreneurship has largely been established with an aim of finding solution to the diverse problems facing humanity today. As the society becoming more globalized, social entrepreneurship has been taking new shapes, in which integration of elements of business and volunteership has been advocated among the contemporary organizations.
This has been observed in many corporations that have been engaging in corporate social responsibility to facilitate coherence with the society. However, high degree of poor governance and lack of accountability has been observed in most of the contemporary organizations in the social entrepreneurship sector.
Through innovation on social welfare, the currently experienced high level of information technology can be attributed to the increasing social networking, which is helping largely in communicating sustainability information on management and resources use.
Works Cited
Ankara, Jackson. Organizational Problems of Non-Governmental Organizations. March 23, 2010. Web.
Bornstein, David. How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Trevis, Certo, and Toyah, Miller. Social Entrepreneurship: Key Issues and Concepts. 2008. Web.