Technological interventions in social business: Mapping current research and establishing future research agenda

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Highlights

  • This paper presents an in-depth statistical analysis of literature on technological interventions for sustainable social business showcasing the development of the scholarship, major themes and possible future trajectories.

  • The study exhibits that most of the work in social business has been done by the scholars based in developed countries, with limited contributions emanating from developing countries.

  • The study proposes a framework for the use of technology in sustainable social businesses with focus areas of research such as social innovation, digital technology, information systems and decision making for sustainability.

  • The results show that digital technologies are increasingly being accepted as tools for sustainability and scalability of social business.

Abstract

Social businesses, despite having a huge potential to generate substantial and sustainable value, are often structurally and financially fragile. Technological interventions, such as social media analytics, big data, Internet of Things, and blockchain can help social businesses by leveraging the practices towards financial and operational sustainability. This study is the first of its kind in that it analyses existing scholarly works on social businesses using bibliometric analysis. In so doing, this paper presents an in-depth statistical analysis of the literature on technological interventions in sustainable social business, showcasing the development of the scholarship, major themes, and possible future research trajectories. The SCOPUS database is used to identify a large section of articles. The study shows that most of the work in social business has been done by scholars based in developed countries, with limited contributions emanating from developing countries. The study proposes a framework for the use of technology in sustainable social businesses with focus areas of research such as social innovation, digital technology, information systems, and decision making for sustainability. The results show that digital technologies are increasingly being accepted as tools for the sustainability and scalability of social businesses. The paper offers useful recommendations for future research in relevant fields.

Introduction

Social business (SB) as defined by Yunus (2007) is a market-based business which exclusively focuses on social causes and gives priority to social benefits instead of gaining profit for self-interest (Spieth et al., 2018). Creating economic, social, and environmental value is imperative for developing a business that integrates the potent pool of resources (Hahn, 2012; Gold et al., 2020). Therefore, SBs redefine the purpose by strategizing cost recovery and attain sustainability to achieve the goals associated with social values (Babu et al., 2020; Engelke et al., 2015; Yunus et al., 2010). These ventures are a combination of businesses that aim to achieve social goals while simultaneously ensuring commercial success by playing a dual role of a business and a charity organization (Battilana and Lee 2014; Wilson and Post 2013). According to Yunus (2007), there are two types of SB. The first category involves the businesses that prioritize social benefits over profit maximization. These are run mostly by the investors who intend to work on poverty reduction for the unprivileged populace. A poor individual or community who intends to maximize profit owns the second type of business. In such businesses, dividends and equity growth are utilized to aid the poor by improving their quality of life. Technological intervention can support both forms of SB (Rahman et al., 2019; Dey et al., 2018).

Building a sustainable community is becoming a key goal of modern business ventures (Jabłoński and Jabłoński, 2019; Wulandhari et al., 2021). In the current scenario, the business models are often less prioritized in social and public services (Ashraf et al., 2019). While balancing economic, social, and environmental goals, the consideration of business and financial sustainability ought to be highly imperative. Hence, the concept of sustainable social business (SSB) has received increased attention amongst researchers and practitioners (Chesbrough 2010; Foss and Saebi 2018; Neumeyer and Santos 2018). In order to achieve sustainability, digital technology is considered to be of great significance (Gouvea et al., 2018; Luthra et al., 2018; Acquiera et al., 2017), where it leverages the business ecosystem by creating favorable conditions for implementing the constructs of the SB (Presenzaa et al., 2019; Täuscher and Abdelkafi, 2018; Dora et al., 2020). Digital technologies extend the social benefit ecosystem for the population existing at the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) thereby bringing services, such as social health insurance, education subsidy, fertilizer subsidy, and the public distribution system under one umbrella (Dey et al., 2016). These technologies also aid organizations in achieving sustainability in many ways. For example, cloud computing allows small business organizations access to significantly large computing power (Domdouzis, 2015). Hence, it can be claimed that SSB thrives with the use of appropriate technologies.

The successful operations of an SB entail information exchange, knowledge management, business acceleration, and product and service innovation (Yunus, 2007). Digital technologies, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, cloud computing etc., play a crucial role in efficient and creative knowledge management (Ferreira et al., 2015; Calabrese et al., 2020). Hence, technology use by small organizations can bridge the digital divide between large and small enterprises and support balanced development across the economic spectrum (Peerally et al., 2019; Purcell and Toland, 2004). The economy based on digital technology enables the implementation of inclusive tools, such as the sharing economy (Frenken and Schor 2017), the IoT (Metallo et al., 2018), big data (Brock and Khan, 2017), and the concepts of the circular economy (Geissdoerfer et al., 2018). These tools and concepts are considered as the drivers of SSB (Spieth et al., 2018; Vendrell-Herrero et al., 2018).

SB research is in a nascent stage; hence, it requires a comprehensive picture representing the growth of the field across various dimensions (Babu et al., 2020). There is limited evidence of review articles on SBs in leading business and management periodicals. Ariza-Montes and Muniz (2013) reviewed the virtual ecosystems in SB incubation where a review of social entrepreneurial empowerment was performed with a specific focus on identifying the projects that use technologies to deliver services and obtain information about a large number of communities with no limitations. Irene et al. (2016) reviewed various accounting frameworks with respect to the indicators and metrics applied to measure the performance of SB sectors. They presented the strengths and weaknesses of several models, used from the point of view of their capability to address the goals and motivation of various stakeholders involved in SB ecosystems. Ashraf et al. (2019) performed a systematic literature review of SB articles published in the context of emerging economies. They used a narrative synthesis of the variations existing in social-oriented models, frameworks, and interventions. Chaudhuri et al. (2020) carried out a bibliometric analysis to provide a synopsis of scholarly research on SB enterprises. Their work attempted to identify thematic clusters of research in the field. However, there is a lack of evidence in review articles that trace the growth of the literature on the use of technological interventions in SSB from the various disciplines of science, engineering, and business, despite the significant surge in scholarly works in this area. Therefore, there is a pressing need to carry out quantitative research to formulate a premise and characterize a framework that can exhibit the underlying research themes and prescribe directions for future research in the context of SSB.

With these goals, a plethora of bibliometric and econometric tools are applied in this paper. Bibliometrics are used to standardize and analyze varied sources of information (Gil-Doménech et al., 2020; Baker et al., 2020). Bibliometric analysis is used to summarize the most representative results of a set of bibliographic documents (Martinez-Lopez et al., 2018). In this paper, bibliometric analysis is used to obtain an overview of existing research work on the use of technology for SSB so as to define the current trend and future research trajectories in the relevant scholarship. This paper identifies and analyzes prominent researchers, academic journals, and their semantic association and intellectual clusters. Also, the underlying thematic areas enveloping the framework and future directions are proposed. This bibliometric study contributes by delivering answers to the following research questions:

  • RQ1. How has the scholarship on technological interventions in social businesses evolved?

  • RQ2. What are the underlying themes of research in the technological interventions in sustainable social business?

  • RQ3. What external conditions are responsible for the evolution and growth of the scholarly works in the relevant areas?

  • RQ4. What is the underlying framework for the use of technology in sustainable social businesses?

  • RQ5. What should be the direction of future research in this domain?

The paper is structured as follows: the next section describes the methodology of bibliometric analysis. Subsequently, the following section presents bibliometric analysis. The framework on the use of technology in SSB is unveiled in Section 4. Critical discussion on the findings along with contributions of the paper are presented in Sections 5 and Section 6 respectively.

Section snippets

Methodology

Bibliometric analysis is a process of examining the state of research in a given field (Gaviria-Marin et al., 2019; Randhawa et al., 2016; Cobo et al., 2011; Chao et al., 2007). It maps the terrain of the research and its evolution (Andrews, 2003). According to Zupic and Cater (2015), the methodology of bibliometric analysis comprises five essential stages: design of a research, preparation of a sample of articles, presentation of the data, analysis of the data, and presentation and

Bibliometric analysis

The analysis starts with a basic presentation of descriptive bibliometric statistics. The latter part of the analysis involves author statistics, some important indicators of the research field, and the country statistics of the publications.

Framework of the use of technology in sustainable social business

The body of literature on SSB is substantially rich. However, SSB as a standalone concept is still at its nascency. Here bibliometric analysis is used to identify the underlying macro-variables dominant in the field of SSB. Keyword analysis reveals that the research in digital technology use in SBs could be divided into four major areas, i.e., social innovation, digital technology, information systems, and decision making for sustainability. These areas were derived from the use of word tree

Discussion

The work presented in this paper is a bibliometric analysis of articles on technological interventions in SB. Some prominent technological aids found in the literature included ICT tools, social media, blockchain, big data, Industry 4.0 etc. The analysis uses scholarly works spanning fifteen years. The research trends in terms of authors, key terms, country, journals, and research domains were explored. Some of the prominent authors within this domain (with four publications each) are S.

Conclusion

The paper presents a bibliometric study of research in technological interventions in SSB. The study is based on articles extracted from SCOPUS database and analyzed using the bibliometrix R-package. It explores several bibliometric dimensions ranging from year-wise publications, prominent authors, countries, networks, keyword search, and the underlying dimensions of the research. It has been discovered that this research field is still in the nascent stage and offers huge scope and impetus for

Dr. Gunjan Soni is an Assistant Professor at Malaviya National Institute of Technology Jaipur. His-areas of specialization are Agri-fresh supply chain, Application of Machine learning in production systems and Industry 4.0 technologies, agent-based modeling, Supply Chain Risk Management, Supply Chain Quality, Artificial Intelligence in Manufacturing. He is currently developing Multi-agent-based models for Manufacturing systems. My other engagements are focused on risk mitigation in supply chain

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    Dr. Gunjan Soni is an Assistant Professor at Malaviya National Institute of Technology Jaipur. His-areas of specialization are Agri-fresh supply chain, Application of Machine learning in production systems and Industry 4.0 technologies, agent-based modeling, Supply Chain Risk Management, Supply Chain Quality, Artificial Intelligence in Manufacturing. He is currently developing Multi-agent-based models for Manufacturing systems. My other engagements are focused on risk mitigation in supply chain and quality engineering for perishable supply chain.

    Dr. Sachin K Mangla is working as a Faculty of 1Jindal Global Business School, O P Jindal University, Haryana, India. He is also affiliated with University of Plymouth, United Kingdom. His-research is in the field of Green and Sustainable Supply Chain and Operations; Industry 4.0; Circular Economy; Decision Making and Modelling. He has a teaching experience of more than five years in Supply Chain and Operations Management and Decision Making, and currently associated in teaching with various universities in UK, Turkey, India, China, France, etc. He has published/presented several papers in repute international/national journals. Dr. Mangla's field of research is Green SC/Sustainability/Smart Manufacturing/Circular Economy/Risk Management/Simulation/Reverse Logistics/Energy/Decision Making and Empirical research.

    Dr Pallavi Singh is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing at Sheffield Business School, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK. Before commencing her academic career, she was a Civil Servant in India. She obtained her PhD in Ethical Marketing from University of Sheffield Management School, Sheffield, UK; her MBA in Marketing also from University of Sheffield Management School (SUMS) UK; her Masters in Hindi Literature (Silver Medallist) and her Bachelors in Physics from the prestigious University of Allahabad in India.  Her research interest includes environmental education in schools, and higher education institutions, sustainable consumption in families, socialization theory, green consumer behavior and child influence in family purchase decision making. Her work has been presented at the Academy of Marketing Conference, World Environmental Education Congress and many more conferences across Asia and Europe.

    Dr Bidit Dey (corresponding author: [email protected]) is a Reader in Marketing and the Head of Executive Education, Alumni Relations and Stakeholder Engagement at Brunel Business School, Brunel University London. His-research interest revolves around digital consumer culture, consumer acculturation and co-creation of value. His-research led papers and commentaries have been published in leading marketing, information systems and management journals including International Marketing Review, Industrial Marketing Management, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Journal of Marketing Management, Information Technology and People and Information Systems Management. He has guest edited special issues and co-edited a monograph. Bidit has been actively involved in executive training and management consultancy.

    Dr Manoj Dora has several years of experience in teaching, research and consultancy worldwide. He is the founder of “Circular Food Forum” which brings together academic, industries and policy makers to facilitate dialog and take forward research agenda. Manoj's areas of specializations are Sustainable Value Chain and Quality Management with a focus on Lean Six Sigma in the agro-food sector. He has been involved in many capacity building initiatives focusing on the circular economy, humanitarian operations, industry 4.0 and food supply chain in Europe, Africa, South America and Asia.

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