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Photorealistic cluttered desk with open academic books, papers, highlighters, and a laptop displaying text in a study room.

Photorealistic cluttered desk with open academic books, papers, highlighters, and a laptop displaying text in a study room.

2. Theoretical framework and literature review 2.1 Social entrepreneurship and institutional voids: Social entrepreneurship research spans three broad traditions: corporate social responsibility framed as a cross-sector partnership; income generation by non-profits in pursuit of a social mission (Dees, 1998; Boschee, 1998); and increasingly, a process view emphasizing innovative resource combinations to create social value where markets and state mechanisms have failed (Mair & Martí, 2006; Martin & Osberg, 2007; Dacin et al., 2011). This study follows the third tradition. Mair and Martí (2006) define social entrepreneurship as the innovative use and combination of resources to pursue opportunities that address social needs, foregrounding process over structure. Austin et al. (2006) clarify that social and commercial entrepreneurship differ most fundamentally in their relationship to market failure: social ventures arise precisely where commercial incentives are absent, which implies that the barriers confronting the two forms may differ in composition rather than only in degree. Zahra et al. (2009) distinguish social bricoleurs, who address small-scale local needs, from social constructionists, who build new institutions, and social engineers, who challenge existing institutional orders; in a setting such as Nangarhar, where formal institutional infrastructure is severely degraded, bricolage and constructionist activity are the most plausible modes (Najafizada & Cohen, Ver mais