Creating good work : the world's leading social entrepreneurs show how to build a healthy economy /

An emerging entrepreneurial area, social entrepreneurship is a flexible form of business, often combining elements of both for-profit and nonprofit enterprises. In Creating Good Work, a diverse group of social entrepreneurs offer advice about developing social businesses and share their own experiences. Editor Schultz (founder, Entrepreneurs4Change) has organized this work in two sections, the first covering theoretical foundations "of why and how the work gets done" and the second, practical applications. As in any edited work, chapter quality ranges from very good to mediocre. Chapter 3 by Schultz is among the best in quality; it presents a four-tier hierarchical model (principles, models, rules, and behaviors) explaining how social entrepreneurship succeeds. In the practical application section, the three chapters on microfinance provide outstanding insights into the challenges of sustaining microfinance projects. Many chapter contributors are authors of other books--e.g., R. Paul Herman, The HIP Investor (2010), and Bill Shore, The Imaginations of Unreasonable Men (2010)--and the links to contributors' websites provided at the end of the book will be helpful for further exploration. This is an excellent primer on social entrepreneurship and a very suitable textbook for social entrepreneurship courses. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduate through professional collections. J. J. Janney University of Dayton