The Seventeenth Session of the “Faculty Working Paper Series” was conducted on April 25,
2023. Dr. S. Maheswaran from the Department of Operations Management and Mr. D. I. J.
Samaranayake from the Department of Management Studies made a presentation based on the
title “Social as an Epiphenomenon of Economics! Experimenting Young People’s Social
Enterprise Intention in a Developing Country”. The paper was reviewed by Dr. Ramila
Usoof from the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts, University of Peradeniya. The event
was graced by the Dean, Heads of the Departments, and Academic Staff members of the Faculty
of Management. A brief abstract of the paper is given below:
In this paper, we make an attempt to understand the concepts of ‘social’ and ‘sociality’ in the
context of social enterprise in a developing country through choice experiment. Between profit-
oriented goals and social-oriented goals, there is a dire need to explore social enterprise
intention among undergraduates. Thus, we considered undergraduates who are yet to engage
with entrepreneurship, as the whole university system recently promotes undergraduates to be
‘Social Entrepreneurs [SEs]’. It is important to explore the intention of such SEs as they have the
potential to improve economic outcomes while promoting societal well-being. Though this is
merely a challenge amid the ongoing multifaced crisis as it builds pressure on such communities
due to financial constraints. Thus, we aimed to observe whether undergraduates response
constraints in a pro-social manner, given opportunities to prefer anti-social occupations. We
conducted choice experiments for studying two anti-social behaviours; ‘tax evasion’ and
‘earning from shadow economy’ with a recurrence choice to optimize either the individual or
societal well-being. The experiment used 240 undergraduates from the University of Peradeniya
and consisted of hypothetical scenarios considering the dynamics of financial constraints.
Findings revealed that the pressure of constraints reduces the respondent’s satisfaction with the
occupation assigned and stimulates their engagement in anti-social occupations. Further, the
respondents who disclosed lower ambitions enrolled significantly in anti-social occupations. In
conclusion, the majority of the sample is motivated by anti-social occupations in response to
financial constraints and promotes private gains. Thus, pro-social motivation among
undergraduates needs to be reinforced in order to increase potential SEs in Sri Lanka.
