Business students’ perception of social enterpreneurship in Latvia and study curriculum development

Abstract

Social entrepreneurs play an important role in the economic and social development of the communities in which they operate. The career aspiration of social entrepreneurs can be encouraged if youths are given early educational exposure when they are young. The purpose of this paper is to work out the proposal for study curriculum in order to include a subject of social entrepreneurship. To attain this aim, the following tasks were put forward: (1) to research literature regarding social entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship education; (2) to describe the empirical research methodology; (3) to discuss research results; (4) to propose a module for teaching social entrepreneurship to business students. These tasks account for the structure of the article: introduction, literature review, methodology, results and discussion, conclusions and recommendations. The theoretical basis of the current article consists of recent literature on the social entrepreneurship (taking into account Covid-19 circumstances), social entrepreneurship education, as well as of the legal documents of the Republic of Latvia. The empirical research is bipartite – first, a survey of business students, applying the snowball sampling method, using 5-point Likert scale questionnaire, second, a survey of business school lecturers. The results are interpreted using methods of descriptive and inferential statistics – mean ranking and Kruskal Wallis test. The results of the research have a practical value, as they identify the problematic areas of business education in regard to social entrepreneurship and make it possible to offer a practical solution – an insert module of social entrepreneurship.