Reframing social entrepreneurship to address unexpected emergent social needs: an entrepreneurial bricolage perspective

Social entrepreneurship is one of the most discussed issues in recent management literature. Particularly, social entrepreneurship has recently gained the attention of management scholars interested in understanding its sociological and anthropological aspects. This paper focuses on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s notion of “bricolage” and the way it can represent a significant opportunity to address emergent social needs. Building on a postmodernist philosophical perspective, namely Jacques Derrida’s “deconstructionism”, we attempt to unpack the bricolage phenomenon within the social entrepreneurship field. Following the findings of an in-depth longitudinal case study, we provide a framework conceptualizating theoretically some possible entrepreneurial solutions to social needs. Bricolage is consequently interpreted as a suitable entrepreneurial opportunity to address particular types of social needs that we shall define, in a way, as unexpected and emergent.