City of ‘social saints’: the role of place in driving impact entrepreneurship in Turin, Italy

Abstract

This paper theorizes impact entrepreneurship (IE) in relation to place by examining dynamics at the individual, community, and organizational levels. While existing IE literature emphasizes entrepreneurship aimed at addressing grand challenges, it often adopts an aggregate view that overlooks how locally embedded entrepreneurs access and mobilize social and economic resources. We introduce a novel, multidimensional framework to show how sense of place, community embeddedness and IE interrelate to shape approaches to current social/environmental challenges. Adopting a qualitative approach, this paper investigates how different actors in Turin, Italy, contribute to IE through building on a legacy of social sector institutions. We find that individuals identifying with a place-based vocation of social impact find communities with a shared volition to work together and across organizations. We contribute to understanding how individuals’ senses of place can be leveraged into wider community efforts to support IE in the region. The paper advances the IE concept to account for the individual perspectives influencing local organizing practices and visions for IE rooted in place.