Social Entrepreneurship in Turkey: Challenges and Opportunities

AutorDuygu Türker/Gökay Özerim/Ayselin Yildiz
Cargo del AutorAssist. Prof. Department of International Relations. Yasar University
Páginas215-231

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1. Introduction

Despite the corporate attention through social responsibility or sustainability activities and non-governmental concerns, the growing number of economic, social, and environmental problems requires a paradigm shift in our economic system that will lead the way of sustainable development. Considering its twofold emphasis on entrepreneurship and social issues, social entrepreneurship can meet the challenges of increasing problems with initiating a social and economic change to achieve the principles of

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sustainable development (WCED, 1987). Therefore, besides the qualities of any entrepreneur such as providing a new product, creating a business, and taking a significant economic risk, a social entrepreneur is characterized by having an objective that should be «financially viable and hence sustainable but without looking for profit for the entrepreneur alone since surpluses will not be distributed but will be reinvested into the project» (Laurence, 2013, p.2207).

The concept is originated in the developed countries such as the United States, Canada, and Switzerland and fits well for the problems of developing countries. Despite its longstanding membership in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), United Nations (UN), and commitment to be a member of European Union (EU), Turkey has also struggled with the numerous problems. Depending on its late modernization and industrialization process since 1923 with the declaration of Republic, Turkey has party achieved its national development objectives and still counted as a developing country among the OECD countries. After following a state-led development model for several decades, the country has turned its economic system from an inward oriented model into a liberal policy with implementing the privatization and deregulation program since the beginning of 1980. This transformation of economic system has not only resulted in the economic problems such as inflation, unemployment, or budget deficit, but also affected the whole nature of political, social, and cultural aspects within the country (Kongar, 1999). As a result of the problematic nature of overall state-business relations in Turkey (Bugra, 1994) and the arbitrarily manipulation of the özal’s Motherland Party (ANAP) over the private sector (Rodrik, 1990), the corruption cases were dispersed over the entire system during the 1980s (Baran, 2000) and the ethical climate has been significantly eroded during the 1990s (Ekin and Tezölmez, 1999) and even the 2000s (Bedirhanoglu, 2007).

It is clear that the mismanagement of political and economic system for decades causes various economic, social, and environmental problems in Turkey. In line with the economic problems, Turkey has some significant problems in the areas of employment, poverty, income distribution, gender equality etc. as well as environmental degradation or urbanization. Therefore, when fighting against such diverse problems, the society urgently needs a comprehensive collaboration among public, private, and non-governmental sectors. As a concept, which integrates the corporate attention and non-governmental concerns towards sustainability issues,

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social entrepreneurship can provide a significant tool for the solutions of such problems in a developing country context. The rise of social entrepreneurship as a third sector among businesses and NGOs starts to be emphasized by the scholars (I??k, 2013; Erdogan, Sarikaya, and Kara, 2011), NGOs (TüSEV, 2011), and media (Milliyet, 2008) in Turkey. However, there are still a limited number of studies on the nature and structure of such conceptions in Turkey in order to understand how they can contribute to the economy during its hard times. Hence, the purpose of current study is to analyze how social entrepreneurship is perceived and practiced in Turkey and reveal the structural conditions that support or inhibit the social entrepreneurs. In doing so, the study provides some useful insight on the development of social entrepreneurship in Turkey and makes some important policy implications for the future.

2. Social Entrepreneurship: The Nature and Evolution of Concept in Turkey

Despite the existence of philanthropic activities through the foundation (waqf) mechanism during the Ottoman period (Peri, 1992) and later on the foundations of family-owned holding companies (diversified conglomerates) since the 1970s, the corporate response towards social and environmental problems has been initiated by the multinational companies (MNCs) in the 1990s (Ararat, 2004). These corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities, which are mainly built on the above-mentioned philanthropic tradition of country, have captured the attention of many Turkish companies during the last decades and they developed various projects for the disadvantaged groups in society or natural environment. On the other hand, in spite of the interventions towards the organized civil society during the military coup in 1980, the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have also strengthened during the 2000s and focused more on the social and environmental problems (Topal and Gurdag, 2009). Today, there are approximately 99.300 active NGOs in Turkey and they are operating in various fields of society.

This heightened awareness of businesses and NGOs in Turkey during the last decades manifest itself not only in their active involvement of CSR projects, but also through their interest to the concepts of social entrepreneurship (Laurence, 2013) and corporate social entrepreneurship activities (Hemingway, 2013). However, social entrepreneurship is still a

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new concept in Turkey. Table 1 presents some studies among the limited number of scholarly work on the concept in Turkey. It might be seen that the overall approach of Turkish academic community towards social entrepreneurship aligns with the global responses. Based on the integrated approach of this community, the term might be defined as the activities that aim to create a social benefit with the transformational solutions (Denizalp, 2007) from innovative (Güler, 2011; Konakl? and Gögü?, 2013) and entrepreneurial perspective (K?r?lmaz, 2013) to increase the social performance (I??k, 2013). Considering the scope and definitions of these studies, a social entrepreneur is characterized by the qualities of transformational leaders and attributed a high degree of altruistic motives in Turkish academic context. Although this initial conceptualization contributes a lot to the development of field, building such an idealized image for social entrepreneurs might distort the perception of readers and increase the skepticism about the feasibility of such activities in the real life.

Table 1. Conceptualization of Social Entrepreneurship in Turkish Literature

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Source. (Denizalp, 2007; Güler, 2011; I??k; 2013; K?r?lmaz, 2013; Konakl? and Gö?ü?, 2013)

Despite this scholarly attention that is in line with the global understanding and approach, the social entrepreneurship has been usually conceptualized and practices in the nexus of sustainability and social responsibility activities by the business community. Although some authors try to clearly distinguish these concepts with emphasizing the differences in their objectives (Yaprak and Ilter, 2010) or providing the overlaps (I??k, 2013), social entrepreneurship is frequently viewed as an extension of CSR. For instance, the results of a relatively early survey, which...

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