A review of social franchising: Consolidation of literature and future research direction

We take a holistic review of literature on social franchising focusing theories and results. Initially, 97 articles were selected out of which 65 have been narrowed down by our research objectives. All the articles were from databases of ISI Web of Science and Scopus covering the period 2002 to 2019. We identified resource scarcity theory, agency theory, stewardship theory and social networks theory underlying the research of social franchising. Subsequently, theories were integrated with contemporary research to identify research gaps and future research direction. The research finds that social franchising although uses commercial franchising theories, however because of social objectives, requires deepened monitoring. Further, there is a need to conduct researches from a managerial perspective as current researches mostly focus health perspective.