Social Entrepreneurship and Social Learning: The View from Mount Nebo

Research in entrepreneurship is often focused on questions related to the personality of the entrepreneur (traits, style etc.) or on the way that an entrepreneur founds an organization and make it sustainable so that it can appropriately contend with the context (contingency, neo-institutionalism, resource dependency theory etc.). This article focuses on two central questions related to entrepreneurship, a subject that has not been the target of much research so far: How can an entrepreneur change his personal point of view during his professional life and adapt his leadership (in particular by developing social learning)? When is it beneficial for an organization to “escape from” the entrepreneur’s control and change its mode of leadership? In recent years, management and business administration courses have made extensive use of the case-study approach, which appears to be a good tool to build inductive knowledge. Yin (2013) stressed the importance of making sure that the knowledge is relevant and valid for the question being studied, with the field from which the case study is drawn being secondary. Because it deals with universal patterns of characters and situations, the Bible is an excellent resource for significant case studies involving entrepreneurship. This article proposes to use a case study from the Bible for this purpose. The case study I have chosen is the story of Moses, a figure whose story became a celebrated and constitutive myth, and that consequently has the potential to arouse a deep emotional connection and to turn an abstract discussion on management issues into something tangible and real. ‘Moses’ conduct and the manner in which that conduct is reported to the reader of the Bible are relevant for a discussion on social entrepreneurs, with a focus on three contexts: Moses as an entrepreneurial figure, the link between entrepreneurs and their mission, and the entrepreneur’s trap.