Prof Harm Barkema NAB 4.24

This course is compulsory on the MSc in Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship. This course is not available as an outside option.

A key insight of social innovation and enterprise is that the type of management solution (unlike traditional management solutions) depends entirely on – and varies with – the type of social problem at hand. Hence, social innovation and enterprise starts with understanding the social problem it seeks to address. This course starts with a rigorous examination of key insights, concepts and theoretical frameworks (economic, psychological, sociological perspectives) that are essential in understanding social problems for social innovation. Applied to globally identified core challenges: the Sustainable Development Goals (on poverty, health, education, and the natural environment). The theory will be taught through interactive lectures, FB discussions where students post and discuss new contributions, cases, empirical studies, and videos.

Next, the course continues with classes teaching (qualitative) methodologies, methods and tools, which are applied by student teams to a real life case/problem in one of the SDG domains and presented and discussed in class as a pedagogical device.

Finally, two integration classes, where student teams synthesize and apply theory (insights, concepts, frameworks) and methodology (methods, tools) to their real life case/problem and develop an initial proposal for social innovation and enterprise, presented and discussed in class.



More specifically, students learn:

• Key theoretical approaches (economic, psychological, sociological) to understanding social problems underlying social innovation and entrepreneurship;
• How to apply these core theoretical approaches to a broad but important class of real life challenges, as addressed by the Sustainable Development Goals;
• Empirical findings – from social science research – on how social problems differ across contexts (cultural, economic, sociological, political);Core methodological approaches (methods and tools of qualitative analysis) to analyse real-life social problems;Synthesizing and relating theoretical and methodological insights, concepts, and frameworks, to understanding social problems, as applied to a real life case;
• More fundamentally, learning how and why management solutions in the domain of social innovations and social enterprise are not generic but always ‘contextualized,’ and depend on the specific social problem, and how core theoretical approaches and methodologies can be used to develop an evidence-based understanding of the local social problem at hand, as a starting point for designing social innovations and enterprises (developed further in MG4G2 Social Innovation Design).

15 hours of lectures and 15 hours of classes in the MT.

Students will be expected to produce 1 essay in the MT.

The formative essay is a voluntary ‘pre-run’ of the individual summative essay, where the academic insights of the course are combined and synthesized with new insights sourced from the academic literature by the student to (theoretically) analyse a real life social problem (with suggestions for which methodology to apply & how and why). Students receive feedback on their formative essay in the same way they get feedback on the summative essay (although for the summative essay, they are not allowed to select the same social problem again).

Beteille, A. (2003). Poverty and inequality. Economic and Political Weekly, 4455-4463.

Wright, E.O., 2009, Understanding class, New Left Review, Nov-Dec.

Banerjee, A. V., & Duflo, E. (2007). The economic lives of the poor. The journal of economic perspectives: a journal of the American Economic Association, 21(1), 141.

Dolan, C. and M.J. Johnstone-Louis, 2011, Re-siting Corporate Responsibility: The Making of South Africa’s Avon Entrepreneurs, Fiscaal: European Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, 60 (Summer) 21-33.

Dolan, C., Johnstone-Louis, M., & Scott, L. (2012). Shampoo, saris and SIM cards: seeking entrepreneurial futures at the bottom of the pyramid. Gender & Development, 20(1), 33-47.

Morduch, J. (1999). The microfinance promise. Journal of economic literature, 37(4), 1569-1614.

Shakya, Y. B., & Rankin, K. N. (2008). The politics of subversion in development practice: an exploration of microfinance in Nepal and Vietnam. The Journal of Development Studies, 44(8), 1214-1235.

Project (45%), essay (45%, 1500 words) and class participation (10%) in the MT.