The Social World of Impact

This chapter introduces the main argument of this book, namely that that impact is not the given property of a venture nor the sole result of entrepreneurs’ intrinsic desire to change the world. Instead, the crux of my argument is that impact emerges iteratively from a process of social engagement and negotiation among different actors who participate, in their own way, in this process. In this chapter, I develop this argument by defining impact entrepreneurship and, in particular, the concept of impact work advanced in this book to, then, then, briefly present my theoretical apparatus. I also briefly describes the ethnographic fieldwork through which I gained rare access to the backstage work of impact entrepreneurship and interacted closely with those circling around entrepreneurs. This book results of these encounters. It describes and analyzes how these people think, interact, engage, evaluate, make choices, and eventually, collaborate around the definition and production of impact through venture creation.