Technology in Social Entrepreneurship Studies: A Bibliometric Analysis (1990-2019)

This paper presents a bibliometric analysis of the academic studies focused on technology in social entrepreneurship, published from 1990 to 2019 and indexed in WoS database. Quantitative evidence supports the idea that this topic has gained increasing attention of scholars, especially recently. However, there are rooms for further studies oriented to analyse social enterprises’ ability to adopt technologies to be sustainable and competitive in a hyper-turbulent market in which technology represents a key component. The descriptive statistical analysis identifies the most prolific authors, journals, countries and institutions that have contributed to the development of this topic; and the citation trends reveal a significant consolidation of this field of research that reflects the development of other theories regarding the role that technology has in social entrepreneurship.


Technology in Social Entrepreneurship
Social entrepreneurship refers to the ability to creating innovative solutions for social concerns, mobilizing resources to pursue social and economic goals. This means that social entrepreneur is an important source of creativity and innovation (Bacq, Ofstein, Kickul, & Gundry, 2015), and social entrepreneurship encompasses an ample range of innovative praxes in social and business domains (Nicholls, 2008), by stimulating the conception and the adoption of new technologies (Mulloth et al., 2016). In addition, social entrepreneurship often represents a push for other firms to develop new technologies and promote social innovations (Surie, 2017). This means that this kind of entrepreneurship promotes technological advancement in order to endorse economic growth, progress and social well-being, and to be competitive in the market (Wilson & Post, 2013), especially in the current globalized world (Zahra, Rawhouser, Bhawe, Neubaum, & Hayton, 2008). Moreover, because of the mission of social entrepreneurship, an increasing attention is oriented to green technologies that involve in energy-saving, waste recycling, green product design, pollution prevention and reduction and on environmental protection (Y. S. Chen, 2013), in line with the suggestions of Bruntland report (1987). In fact, social entrepreneurship acts as a change agent, transforming socially responsible principles into business and commercial ideas (Schwab, 2008) through technologies and innovations to identify both new business opportunities to profit and addressing social challenges (Hadad & Cantaragiu, 2017).
Given the statements above, notwithstanding scholars are generally agreed about the relevance of technology to enhance and improve business performance, this concept in the field of social entrepreneurship remains relatively under researched (Mulgan et al., 2007;Phillips et al., 2015), and it deserves more attention to contribute to a social entrepreneurship theory building. For this reason and to follow the call of Abu-Saifan (2012) which argues that as social entrepreneurship has flourished at the practical level, it lacks theoretical level, this research tries to link social entrepreneurship as a new discipline and research field to technology and innovation theories. To do this, this paper carries out a bibliometric analysis to analyze academic studies that jointly consider technology and social entrepreneurship to understand whether a new stream of research is being born and of addressing interested scholars towards specific authors, journals and articles.

Methodology
Bibliometric exploration consists of applying a statistical method to assess both qualitative and quantitative considerations through the investigation of publications in a specific field, detecting tendencies within a discipline (De Bakker, Groenewegen, & Den Hond, 2005). Moreover, this analysis, already used in social entrepreneurship studies (Rey-Martí et al., 2016), provides interesting information for scholars to investigate academic publications (Duque Oliva, Cervera Taulet, & Rodríguez Romero, 2006), to evaluate the influence of journals (Baumgartner & Pieters, 2003), to consider the scientific impact (Van Dalen & Henkens, 2001), to obtain the intellectual structure of a field (Marku, Castriotta, & Di Guardo, 2017), and to observe a specific field evolution (Hung, 2012). In addition, as underlined by De Bakker et al. (2005), this analysis represents an innovation with reference to traditional literature reviews and appears particularly suitable for studying technology in social entrepreneurship studies. To do this, this work retrieved academic articles from Web of Science (WoS) database, as one of the largest databases that include scientific documents from different disciplines. This span of time was 1990-2019 and was chosen because, during these twenty years, an increased number of studies have examined this specific topic. This increased interest is particularly pronounced from 1996 to 2019. To achieve a broader perspective, we extended our retrieval of citations to the ten years before 1990, utilising the keyword combinations detailed below. First, we selected all of the articles that were included and indexed in the WoS database that contained the following keywords: "Social Entrepreneurship" OR "Social Entrepreneur" OR Social Enterprise". We obtained 3,064 academic articles from this search. Second, we selected all of the academic articles that contained the word "Technology". Table 1 highlights the top 50 key words resulting from search outcomes. This search retrieved more than 1,221,286 articles. We then combined the two searches and identified 180 documents that we considered without further refinements. The bibliometric tool search was performed in autumn 2019. From the retrieved list of documents, the different investigative analysis was generated. Various rankings that relate to the publication quantities, citations, countries, institutions, authors and core journals of the articles in the database are presented in the following sections.

Results and Discussion
A total of 180 articles were selected for the analysis. Table 2 shows the number of papers that were published between 1990 and 2019 that simultaneously contained at least one of the aforementioned keywords. Since no academic articles were found between 1990 and 1996, in the following tables and figures it is omitted to indicate that time period. Figure 1 reveals that between 1996 and 2019, an upward trend has been observed with respect to the number of publications that address technology in social entrepreneurship. In particular, this number has risen considerably during the last eight years of the examined time period. Table 1 indicates that since 2015, there has been considerable interest in this topic from scholars, and the number of publications regarding this topic has increased steadily from 2012 to the present day. Notably, this number of publications has almost doubled between 2012 and 2019. The increasing number of articles about technological aspects within social entrepreneurship studies demonstrates the existence of a strong academic interest on this subject (the 2019 data are partial, but the trend appears to demonstrate that this growth is assured). Perhaps, a more interesting finding than the number of publications regarding technology in social entrepreneurship is the number of citations by year of these publications, which is depicted in figure 2. These citation trends reveal the rapid development of this topic, particularly since 2014; a marked increase in citations has particularly occurred during the previous two years (2017 and 2018). The enlarged number of citations regarding this topic reveals that scholarly interest is constantly growing, and this suggests that the argument is generating a niche of interest and may engender a new field in the study of social entrepreneurship. compares and summarizes these two trends, which allows us to observe a common trajectory. Unsurprisingly, the trend is more evident for the number of citations than for the number of publications; these trends reveal that the interest of scholars with respect to the topic of technology in social entrepreneurship is increasing in its importance and relevance.  Table 3 and Figure 4 depict the number of papers published on this topic in each country. The geographic distribution of scientific production is dominated by the United States of America, which contributed almost 32% of all of the relevant papers that were published during the twenty-three years that are examined in this study. Scholars are also produced high-impact original research in England, Australia, China, Canada, Netherlands, Scotland and Spain. Focusing on European countries, 69 articles were published, around 38% of the whole of articles assessed in this work.
The dominant position of the United States should be interpreted with caution because this may be at least partially related to the bias of the social science publications towards Anglo-Saxon countries. In fact, the U.S. produces nearly 60% of the research output across all of the social science outlets, either singularly or through scientific cooperation (Van Leeuwen, 2006). Moreover, the marked differences among countries with respect to the number of published papers about technology in social entrepreneurship could also be explained in part by differences in population, business models, enterprise size and economic scenario.  To determine the number of core journals that published articles addressing the specific topic of interest, we can use Bradford's Law as a general guideline (Bradford, 1934). This principle states that journals within a single field can be divided into three categories, each of which contains the same number of articles: (a) a core of journals on the subject that are relatively few in number but account for approximately one third of all the articles; (b) a second group of journals that accounts for the same number of relevant articles as the first category but includes a larger number of journals; and (c) a third group of journals that accounts for the same number of articles as the second group but includes an even larger number of journals. Although Bradford's Law is not statistically accurate, it is commonly used as a general rule of thumb.
In this case, as underlined in Table 4 and Figure 5, considering only journals, in total 112 (excluding proceedings paper, review, early access, correction, editorial material) three journals contained 12 relevant articles, and 8 journals contained another 16 relevant articles. In particular, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Journal of Social Entrepreneurship and Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice published one third of the examined papers. Thirty-three journals published the next third of the papers of interest, whereas sixty-eight journals published the last third of the papers in question.  Figure 5. A depiction of the 11 most productive journals between 1990 and 2019 with respect to publishing articles that address technology in social entrepreneurship Table 5 indicates the authors who published articles in the examined time period regarding the topic of interest.
The production of articles about technology in social entrepreneurship is very diversely distributed. There is no single author who dominates this topic through the production of a plethora of articles. The table below shows the 25 most productive authors.

Conclusion
This article presented a bibliometric analysis of the academic studies on technology in social entrepreneurship research to identify the most prolific and most cited scholars, the trend in the number of publications and citations, the most relevant journals, the most engaged institutions, and other aspects that allowed to frame the state of the art and the expected trend. We used diverse graphic and tabular representations to describe the development of scholarly interest in this topic. We first considered the evolution of studies regarding this topic by analysing the number of relevant papers that were published in the examined time period, providing the number of citations of these articles and comparing the trend for publications with the trend for citations. We then outlined the geographic distribution of relevant scientific production by country, identified core journals that have published articles addressing the specific topic of interest, recognised the most prolific authors who have addressed this subject, and revealed the most productive institutions with respect to this topic. Finally, we listed the most-cited articles regarding technology in social entrepreneurship studies and identified the publications that contained these articles, enabling a partial connection between these articles and earlier portions of the study. Quantitative evidence supported the idea that the investigated topic has obtaining increasing attention of scholars, especially recently. However, in light of the positive trend that this argument has pertaining, there are rooms for further studies oriented to analyse the ability of social enterprises to adopt technologies to be sustainable and competitive in a hyper-turbulent market in which technology represents a key component.
Findings offers a useful toolbox to those scholars that are interested in the field of technology in social entrepreneurship, providing interesting information on which journal and authors to check.
This study has some drawbacks mainly referred to the use of WoS as the unique database for the analysis. This database covers the most seminal and impactful academic publications, but other contributions could be ignored, even if equally relevant, because published in journals that are not indexed in WoS database. In this sense, further studies are expected to consult other databases in order to cover a major number of journals, also those with a lower impact factor. Moreover, the analysis presented in this chapter does not consider the fact that recent works are likely less cited than older documents and may not have existed for a sufficient length of time to influence the literature regarding the specific topic of interest. The existing evolutionary phase may be sustained by these investigations, and future research efforts, e.g., the use of additional bibliometric techniques, such as bibliographic coupling or co-citation analysis, may complement these studies by providing a description of technological adoption by social entrepreneurship that draws upon another perspective. These methods could be applied to social network analyses to re-define clusters, measurements and graphic representations.
However, we are reasonably confident that the literature of the chosen time period and of the used database that has been examined in this paper represents the major segment of studies that focus on technology in the context of social entrepreneurship.
In summary, the present study and related investigations offer a quantitative analysis of state-of-the-art research as a complement to (but never a substitute for) traditional qualitative methods of reviewing the existing literature. This method may be used as a tool to recognise the authors, documents, journals, and topics that are most widely disseminated among scholars in a specific field and to identify the relational links among these features of the topic of interest.