| Emerging as a global phenomenon over the last couple of decades, social entrepreneurship is a dynamic and innovative approach to grappling with community problems. By leveraging positive outcomes from efforts directed at specific social targets, social entrepreneurs seek to deliver sustainable social impact from their work. One of the central goals and constructs of social entrepreneurship is going to scale, the replication of an organization in another community intended to increase stakeholder involvement, improve efficiency, and enhance the effectiveness of programming.;However, when examining the extant literature on social entrepreneurship and going to scale, both a theoretical and methodological deficit emerges in efforts to interpret this phenomenon. Largely absent from this literature are the crucial theories of the social: field theory, institutional theory, network theory and embeddedness. Additionally, the extant typologies of social entrepreneurship and the methodological approaches to modeling going to scale, fail to account for the nonlinear, complex and dynamic nature of the social entrepreneurship organization going to scale in a new community. Because of this, we may not have a clear and adequate grasp on the strategic behavior that occurs between various actors among various nodes at the different operational levels of a social entrepreneurship organization as it goes to scale.;By applying a theory of fields and a methodology rooted in the triangulation of data, we can better understand the both the contextual foundation and the strategic action occurring between the clientele and the organizations (microlevel), the client, the organization and the donor (mesolevel) and the funders/donors (macrolevel). In doing so, this research study not only makes a meaningful contribution to the literature on how to successfully model social entrepreneurship going to scale, but also serves as a meaningful contribution to philanthropic and organizational learning. |
