Business schools appear to be engaged in a transformational quest. Notably, Akrivou and Bradbury-Huang (2015) comment on the ways in which western business schools socialize students into a “fragmented” executive self. They emphasize that students learn instrumental rationality as a single, core value, even if the resulting practices are at odds with what those students would do as their “true” selves. Like Petriglieri and Petriglieri (2010), Akrivou and Bradbury-Huang (2015) suggest that students’ identity is at the heart of their learning process and that business schools should facilitate conversations (Baker, Jensen, & Kolb, 2002), both internal and with others, to discuss and reflect upon the transformational aspects of the educational journey. In other words, those authors encourage teaching approaches that support students’ capacity for integrating their “self” (micro) with others in teams (meso) and broader communities (macro).

Interestingly, it echoes the literature on social entrepreneurship education (SEE), which calls for a holistic perspective of students’ identity development(Smith & Woodworth, 2012) when they enact competing logics in team projects (Pache & Chowdhury, 2012) and engage with communities to produce social impacts (Plaskoff, 2012). However, SEE initiatives are not immune to (self)criticism and obstacles, which raises questions about their capacities to nurture aspiring social entrepreneurial identities. Students might face peer pressure, the initial expectations of their family, societal expectations and even their own doubts (Jarrodi, Byrne, & Bureau, 2019; Pache & Chowdhury, 2012). Recently, Zhu et al. (2016) warned of “identity threats” where student shift from a SE identity to a "decidedly commercial identity" (p. 612) and suggest pedagogical approaches - such as dialogue and narrative practices - that would help students integrate both commercial and social logics.

Given the identity challenge in SEE, as well as the emerging teaching proposals developed to tackle it, we care about “how published scholars in the SEE literature make sense of their field in terms of teaching objectives, concepts and methodologies”. Beyond this description, we also explore “to what extent such proposals support the students’ capacity to reveal their “self” and integrating it to meso- and macro levels”, thereby addressing Akrivou and Bradbury-Huang (2015)’s call for a “new normal” in business schools.

Our study organizes what we know about SEE as an articulation of cognitive and social learning processes at the three levels of analyses covered by SEE, i.e., the micro (individual), meso (organization) and macro (community) levels. We identify the potential for supporting self-integrated students’ development as well as extant proposals that do not fully unleash the self-integrating potential of students. We highlight two main gaps. The first gap is the topic of collective (and especially organizational) identity when team members reflect on their joint motivations and intentions. The second gap is collective efficacy as a way to discuss students’ perceptions regarding what their team (and themselves as team members) has developed in terms of expertise when expressing their intention in action.

To date, SEE has been theorized as education about and for SE: a model of social entrepreneurship education that “allows students to understand and make sense of the world in which social entrepreneurs operate” by developing bridging skills (Pache & Chowdhury, 2012: 495). We recognize the need to train students in enacting and bridging logics in project and broader communities. Yet, we complement Pache and Chowdhury’s model by outlining the skill needed to unleash the transformational capacities of SE: beyond bridging capacities, aspiring social entrepreneurs require binding skills, i.e., the skill of integrating oneself into other- and system levels while respecting personal intentions and moral values.

Regarding obstacles and SEE scholars’ creative experimentations for nurturing an SE identity, we suggest that SEE teaching proposals deserve further investigation with a focus on their capacity to self-integrate students’ identity. We approach this subject through a systematic review of the SEE literature. For our data collection, we followed Saebi, Foss, and Linder (2019)’s protocol and sought relevant peer-reviewed articles (in English) in both the Scopus database and the Web of Science database. We selected keywords to restrict our literature review to articles concerned by SEE (488 hits in Scopus and 144 in Web of Science, on 1 January 2020). We kept the most relevant journals for management scholars using the Academic Journal Guide 2018 by the Chartered Association of Business School (ABS). This search identified 173 articles. Then, we screened the abstract of articles to ensure that their focus was on SEE and kept a set of 77 relevant articles. Lastly, we uploaded in a dedicated Endnote library and a new Nvivo project to proceed with the analysis. First, in a preliminary analysis, we inductively identify the main teaching proposals - concepts, objectives, methodologies - deemed publishable in the field of SEE. In this pre-analysis phase, we aimed at unveiling the emergence of original topics and concepts that are mobilized in SEE and deemed publishable by the research community. Next, we used the lens of the experiential conversational learning framework (Baker et al., 2002), as recommended by Akrivou and Bradbury-Huang (2015), to examine whether SEE teaching proposals support the "self-integrated" development of students. From a practical point of view, experiential conversational learning requires distinguishing between opportunities for students to reflect on themselves on the one hand and opportunities to express themselves in a social context on the other. We therefore analyse this ensemble through the cognitive (alone) and social (in relation to others) learning pathways of students as they appear in SEE. Finally, we propose an articulation of the different levels of integration micro-, meso- and macro-levels through the experiential conversational learning model and its dialectics of “praxis”, “intersubjectivity”and “hospitality”. This last step allows us to make visible the existing and future levers for the "self-integrated" development of students in SEE.

We question the capacity of SEE to support student identity challenge in integrating their “self” (micro) with others in teams (meso) and broader communities (macro).We theorize the transformative capabilities of the field as “Education through SE”. We suggest that, by focusing on “binding skills”, SEE could 1) awaken students to their personal values, intentions, motivations and related actions; 2) open students’ capacities to be influential and be influenced in collectives; and 3) make students aware of other systemic influential positions, including those of absentees, on collective and individual actions and intentions. Furthermore, we conceptualize the process of identity construction at stake through self-integration as “identity tacking”, waving back and forth between the self, teammates and broader systems. Through “identity tacking”, aspiring social entrepreneurs are able to select and nurture paths for self-transformation, i.e., co-constructing the self as a community member and a change maker at the macro-level. Similarly, conversations at the meso level facilitates the perception of the self as a team member as well as of the team as the recipient of a salient identity, i.e., organizational identity. As such, we propose avenues for future research on SE identity: the articulation of collective constructs, such as collective efficacy and collective emotions, with individual ones already mobilized in SEE and second, the exploration of collective narrative practices in SE courses to help students co-create their joint stories.

Akrivou, K., & Bradbury-Huang, H. 2015. Educating integrated catalysts: Transforming business schools toward ethics and sustainability. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 14(2): 222–240. Baker, A. C., Jensen, P. J., & Kolb, D. A. 2002. Conversational learning: An experiential approach to knowledge creation. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group. Jarrodi, H., Byrne, J., & Bureau, S. 2019. A political ideology lens on social entrepreneurship motivations. Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 31(7-8): 583–604. Pache, A. C., & Chowdhury, I. 2012. Social entrepreneurs as institutionally embedded entrepreneurs: Toward a new model of social entrepreneurship education. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 11(3): 494–510. Petriglieri, G., & Petriglieri, J. L. 2010. Identity workspaces: The case of business schools. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 9(1): 44–60. Plaskoff, J. 2012. Building the heart and the mind: An interview with leading social entrepreneur sarah harris. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 11(3): 432–441. Smith, I. H., & Woodworth, W. P. 2012. Developing social entrepreneurs and social innovators: A social identity and self-efficacy approach. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 11(3): 390–407. Zhu, Y., Rooney, D., & Phillips, N. 2016. Practice-based wisdom theory for integrating institutional logics: A new model for social entrepreneurship learning and education. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 15(3): 607–625.