Resumo

PALACIOS NUNEZ, Guadalupe. Social Entrepreneurship: Integrating the Excluded in Rural Areas . Revista de Ciencias Sociales [online]. 2010, vol.16, n.4, pp.579-590. ISSN 1315-9518.

Social entrepreneurship can be defined as the ability to recognize opportunities for solving social problems. Social entrepreneurship and its business model are a novel solution for a social problem; they create social value and are considered effective, efficient, and sustainable. The objective of this paper is to show that social entrepreneurship can be an innovative model for addressing the marked rural exclusion that has existed in Mexican farming ever since the agro-exporting phase began and the neoliberal model was adopted. Review of the case under study is based on an analysis of the term social entrepreneurship and its implications, linked to an analysis of rural Mexican problems. To corroborate the theoretical analysis, in-depth interviews with community activists, as well as field observations and a review of information databases on the company network that has been formed, were carried out. Findings seem to show that a social enterprise can be a very plausible response to help small producers return to production and be competitive.

Palavras-chave : Social entrepreneurship; social enterprise; agroindustry; the excluded.