Understanding the effect of culture on social entrepreneurship in Turkey

Governments around the world extend their efforts to find solutions for social issues like poverty, and environmental challenges by setting policies and allocating budgets. But these efforts alone are not sufficient for sustainable development. The world needs new frameworks that address social challenges and justice, unemployment issues and climate change. In the last the decades, social entrepreneurships achieved success in solving such problems on different levels across nations. Social enterprises are business intended essentially for social benefits. In this study, culture as a source of variation across people will be investigated in the Turkish context to explore the effect of social entrepreneurs' cultural dimensions on social enterprises' performance. For this aim a questionnaire consisting of cultural dimensions' measurements and social enterprises performance scales used to collect data from 156 social entrepreneurs in Ankara. Results showed that cultural dimensions of uncertainty avoidance, in-group collectivism and assertiveness have a significant effect on how those social entrepreneurs perceive the performance of their social enterprises. Keywords: Entrepreneurship, Culture, Social Entrepreneurship, social business.