Organizing Social Entrepreneurship in Cuba and the United States: Moving Right to Stay Left and Left to Stay Right in the Era of Neoliberalism

The construct of social entrepreneurship appeared in academia in the latter part of the 1990s and has become increasingly studied since then (Dacin, Dacin, & Tracey, 2011; Fayolle & Matlay, 2010; Short, Moss, & Lumpkin, 2009). Global phenomena of social entrepreneurship provide many opportunities to explore contextual factors that are not yet well understood and social entrepreneurship research is dominated by Western perspectives, leaving a gap for research and analysis of non-Western cases (Mair & Marti, 2006). In this dissertation, the case study of organizing social entrepreneurship in Cuba addresses that gap. I put the Cuba case study into comparison with a case study of organizing social entrepreneurship through the B Corp movement in the United States. I use the interdisciplinary theory of fields (Fligstein & McAdam, 2012) as a framework for arguing that social entrepreneurship is being organized in Cuba and in the United States through similar processes of “strategic action field” formation (Fligstein & McAdam, 2012), but that these processes are at different stages of development and are forming qualitatively different models with comparable constructs.