Article Social entrepreneurs narrating their careers: A psychodynamic-existential perspective Hila Cohen Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel Hagai Katz Department of Business Administration, Guilford Glazer faculty of Business and Management, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel Abstract This study aims to improve our understanding of social entrepreneurs’ careers through narrative analysis of their life stories. Narratives are an important part of the study of career-related transitions, as they form, revise, and reconstruct identities, and drive agency. For this purpose, 24 in-depth semi-structured narrative interviews were conducted with Israeli social entrepreneurs. The findings point out a process which takes place in different spheres and moulds the life story of a social entrepreneur: the personality sphere; the family sphere, including family dynamics and significant childhood experiences; the social sphere, including formative events outside the family; and the moral sphere, which includes attitudes and ideologies. The entirety of spheres generates a consistent meta-narrative which promotes a theoretical integration between psychoanalytical and existential psychological theories and offers a deeper understanding of how and why people become social entrepreneurs. Keywords Social entrepreneurs, existential theory, career development, narrative identity, psychoanalytic theory Introduction The term “social entrepreneurship” emerged in the 1990s (Bornstein, 1998, Dees, 1998, Leadbeater, 1997) and became a very popular buzzword (Bruyat & Julien, 2000) despite still being ill-defined (Danna & Porche, 2008; Van-Ryzin, Grossman, DiPadova- Stocks & Bergrud, 2009; Weerawardena & Sullivan, 2006). Broadly defined, it is the development of innovative, mission-supporting, income earning, job creating or licensing ventures undertaken by individ- uals, non-profit organizations, or non-profit organisa- tions in association with for-profit organisations (Pomerantz, 2003, p. 25). It challenges existing para- digms and conceptions and offers innovative solutions to complex social problems (Sullivan, Weerawardena & Carnegie, 2003). A narrower definition is that social entrepreneurship applies business expertise and market-based skills such as innovative income earning initiatives in the non-profit sector (Reis & Clohesy, 1999; Thompson, 2002). Common across all defin- itions of social entrepreneurship is that the underlying drive for social entrepreneurship is to create social value, rather than personal and shareholder wealth (e.g., Thake & Zadek, 1997). Accordingly, based on the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM; Bosma & Levie, 2010) and work by Wei-Skillern, Austin, Leonard, & Stevenson (2007), we define social entre- preneurship as innovative, social value creating activ- ities that can occur within or across the non-profit, business, or government sectors. Innovation is expressed by using a business methodology, 1 and a social entrepreneur is a founder of an initiative whose purpose is to promote a social cause through the use of business methodology (Bull, 2007; Dart, 2004). Social entrepreneurs are the first and main compo- nent of “social entrepreneurship” (Leadbeater, 1997; Corresponding author: Hagai Katz, Department of Business Administration, Guilford Glazer faculty of Business and Management, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, POB 653 Beersheba, Israel. Email: katzh@bgu.ac.il Australian Journal of Career Development 2016, Vol. 25(2) 78–88 ! Australian Council for Educational Research 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1038416216658046 acd.sagepub.com at BEN GURION UNIV NEGEV on August 27, 2016 acd.sagepub.com Downloaded from