Examination of Postgraduate Theses in Turkey within the Scope of Social Enterprise/Entrepreneur/Entrepreneurship: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Social entrepreneurship is the process of creating social impact using innovative ways to solve social problems. The effect created can ultimately create social value that enables lasting and fundamental changes. There is currently no holistic research in the form of bibliometric analysis on social enterprise/entrepreneur/entrepreneurship in the Turkish literature and the primary aim of this study is to create a bibliometric profile of postgraduate theses in this field. Within the scope of the study, theses prepared in the National Thesis Center on social entrepreneurship were scanned and a total of 80 postgraduate theses produced between 2008-2022 were accessed. The theses were examined according to the parameters “publication year”, “thesis type”, “university”, “institute”, “department”, “keywords”, “publication language”, “research subject”, “research type”, “study group/sample”, “data collection tool”. The findings show that most of the theses were prepared in 2019 and that most are at master's level at Marmara University, Institute of Social Sciences, Department of Business Administration and are in Turkish. The most studied topics are the relationship between leadership/personality traits and social entrepreneurship and social impact/value/development/change. The most frequently used keyword is “social entrepreneurship”, and the most used sample is social entrepreneurs. The qualitative research type was mostly used in the theses. The most frequently used data collection tool is the questionnaire. It is expected that this study will contribute to the related literature and researchers who will work on this subject. In future studies, it is recommended to compare studies on social entrepreneurship by examining different databases such as books, journals, articles, and papers.