It surveys how this term is defined in the published literature — what the sources agree on, where they diverge and what remains contested — and carries its own numbered bibliography. It does not describe what we run. Programme policy is on the core pages.
Our own use of the word is often narrower than general usage; the short definition and the boundary are in the glossary, under Changemaker. The review date below matters, because the literature moves.
A definitional review. Citations follow IEEE style; see References.
Abstract
“Changemaker” is not an academic construct. It is a movement and brand term coined at Ashoka, whose definition is deliberately universal and agency-centred, and which requires neither innovation nor an artefact nor an organisation. This article states the definition and its origin, distinguishes what it does and does not commit anyone to, surveys the thin and institutionally concentrated research literature that has grown around it, and sets out the consequence that follows from an ungated definition: the population it names cannot be enumerated. The looseness is a feature of the movement’s design rather than a defect awaiting correction, but it means the term cannot do evidential work without being narrowed first.
I. Definition
The canonical formulation is Ashoka’s own:
A changemaker is anyone who takes creative action to solve a problem for the greater good [1].
Every element of this is permissive. Anyone admits the whole population. Creative action sets no threshold of originality, method or result. A problem is unqualified as to scale, domain or difficulty. The greater good is the only normative constraint, and it is supplied by the actor.
⚠️ This definition is quoted from Ashoka’s own pages. It is an organisation’s self-description of a term it coined and continues to own, not a research definition, and it has no standing as evidence for the claims made in its name [1].
II. Origins
The term was coined by Bill Drayton in 1980, in Bombay, in the founding of Ashoka [1]. Drayton is generally credited with popularising both changemaker and social entrepreneur, and the extended thesis appears under his name as “Everyone a Changemaker: Social Entrepreneurship’s Ultimate Goal” [2].
The framing is agency-centred rather than output-centred. Drayton’s stated concern is the distribution of felt agency:
Millions of people don’t feel that they can take control of their own lives… to experience an agency moment [1].
Read against that intent, the absence of a qualifying threshold is not carelessness. The claim being made is that the capacity is universal; a definition that gated it on invention, employment or scale would contradict the claim it exists to advance. “Everyone a Changemaker” is a programme, and the definition is built to serve it.
⚠️ Reference [2] was located and its bibliographic record verified, but the article itself was not obtained for this review. It is cited here as the locus of the thesis, and no content claim rests on it beyond its title.
III. What the term does and does not require
The definition’s discriminating power lies almost entirely in what it declines to require.
It requires: an action; that the action be taken by the person; some element of creativity; and an orientation toward a good beyond the actor’s own interest.
It does not require:
- an innovation — the action need not be novel to anyone but the actor;
- an artefact, product or technology — advocacy, organising and care all qualify;
- an organisation, venture or role — changemaking is not tied to employment or incorporation;
- success — the definition is satisfied by the taking of action, not by solving the problem;
- scale, duration or repetition — a single act meets the wording as fully as a career;
- recognition by Ashoka or anyone else.
This is the point at which “changemaker” separates most sharply from the adjacent terms it is often used beside. Social entrepreneur implies a venture; innovator implies novelty; grassroots innovator implies both an artefact or practice and a community locus. Changemaker implies none of these, and any usage that assumes otherwise has silently narrowed the term.
IV. The research base
There is a literature that uses the word. There is very little that treats it as a construct.
A. It functions as an institutional label
The term’s most sustained scholarly appearances arise where a university has adopted it as the name of an initiative. The empirical studies located for this review [3], [4] both study Changemaker at the University of Northampton — an institutional programme — rather than a concept in the general literature. Ashoka’s own “Changemaker Campus” designation operates the same way. This matters for interpretation: findings about Changemaker in these papers are findings about a named programme, not about a construct with an independent definition.
B. The meaning is not stable even among those enacting it
The strongest available empirical evidence on the term’s definiteness is a phenomenographic study of 30 university teachers, which identified five qualitatively different conceptions of Changemaker [3]:
- Changemaker as university strategy
- Changemaker as critical thinking, perspective shifting and problem solving
- Changemaker as employability
- Changemaker as social betterment
- Changemaker as personal transformation
These are not shades of one meaning. A strategy, a cognitive skill set, a labour-market outcome, a social good and an inner change are different kinds of thing. That five such readings coexisted within a single institution, among staff employed to deliver the initiative, is direct evidence that the term does not carry a settled sense. The same paper notes “the absence of literature on teachers’ conceptions of phenomena related to social innovation, social entrepreneurship and intrepreneurship” [3].
C. Operationalisation has been attempted from conceptions, not from a definition
A follow-up study proposed “an attributes framework for embedding ‘Changemaker’… across the disciplines,” building a taxonomy of skills and behaviours associated with each of the five conceptions [4]. The method is worth noting: because there was no agreed definition to operationalise, the framework was derived from the conceptions people held and from the pedagogic literature attached to each. That is a reasonable response to the situation, and it is also a symptom of it.
D. Critical scholarship treats it as discourse
Where the term has drawn sustained critical attention, it has been analysed as discourse rather than as a construct. One study takes Ashoka’s public statements as its corpus and applies Erik Olin Wright’s concept of “real utopias” to surface the moral commitments inside social-innovation language, observing that while actors “may unproblematically unite around a broad perspective of social innovation as bringing about (positive) social change, we rarely see evidence of a shared vision for the kind of social change that social innovation ought to bring about” [5]. Its title poses “Everyone a Changemaker?” as a question. Separately, critical marketing scholarship has examined changemaker identity as a self-branding practice [6].
E. Elsewhere it is used as an unexamined synonym
In the social-entrepreneurship education literature the word is frequently absorbed without definitional work. One paper on changemaker training defines changemakers as “active and resilient social entrepreneurs or innovators who can design and implement innovative solutions for social and environmental problems” [7] — a definition that quietly adds requirements Ashoka’s does not make (entrepreneurship, innovation, implementation) without marking the departure. Usages of this kind are common, and they are why the word cannot be relied upon to mean the same thing across two documents.
V. The consequence: an uncountable definition
The most practically important property of the canonical definition follows from its wording alone and needs no empirical support.
Because the definition supplies no threshold — no artefact, no innovation, no organisation, no scale, no duration, no success criterion — there is no procedure by which a given person could be determined not to be a changemaker. A definition that nothing can fail is a definition that nothing can be counted under.
The term is therefore not usable as a unit of measurement. It cannot support a headcount, a target, a cohort boundary or an outcome metric in its canonical form. Anyone who reports a number of changemakers has applied a gate the definition does not contain, and the number describes that gate rather than the term.
Two things follow. First, this is by design, not by error — “Everyone a Changemaker” asserts universality, and a countable definition would refute the assertion it exists to make. The looseness should not be read as a flaw to be corrected in Ashoka’s usage. Second, any counting use must declare its own gate, because a reader in the social-innovation sector will otherwise supply the Ashoka sense, under which the count is meaningless.
VI. Limitations
The construct lacks an independent research base. No agreed operational definition, no validated instrument and no published measurement procedure for “changemaker” was located in this review. The definitional material available is an organisation’s account of a term it owns [1]; the empirical material studies one university’s programme of the same name [3], [4]; the critical material analyses the discourse rather than the construct [5], [6]. This is an absence claim from a non-exhaustive search and is stated as such — it establishes that no such base was found, not that none exists.
The primary source is not evidence. Reference [1] is Ashoka’s self-description. It is quotable for what the organisation says the word means, and for nothing else.
The empirical base is narrow and institutionally concentrated. Both studies of how the term is understood [3], [4] were conducted at a single UK university, on staff rather than participants, and about a specific institutional initiative. They are strong evidence that the word bore five different meanings in that setting; they are weak evidence about the term in general.
Sources were read at record and abstract level. For this review the bibliographic records and published abstracts of [3]–[7] were obtained and read; their full texts were not. Claims drawn from them are confined to what those abstracts state. Reference [2] was not obtained at all and is cited only as the locus of the thesis named in its title.
“Changemaker” and “social innovation” are entangled in the critical literature. Reference [5] argues about social innovation discourse using Ashoka as its corpus; its findings bear on the changemaker vocabulary by proximity rather than by direct address, and should not be reported as a critique of the changemaker definition specifically.
References
[1] Ashoka, Everyone a Changemaker. Ashoka, Arlington, VA, USA. Organisational self-description; term coined by W. Drayton, 1980, Bombay. (Not research; see Section VI.)
[2] W. Drayton, “Everyone a Changemaker: Social Entrepreneurship’s Ultimate Goal,” Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 80–96, 2006, doi: 10.1162/itgg.2006.1.1.80. (Record verified; not obtained for this review.)
[3] B. Alden Rivers, M. Nie, and A. Armellini, “University teachers’ conceptions of ‘Changemaker’: a starting point for embedding social innovation in learning and teaching,” Education + Training, vol. 57, no. 5, pp. 588–600, 2015, doi: 10.1108/ET-07-2014-0078.
[4] B. Alden Rivers, A. Armellini, and M. Nie, “Embedding social innovation and social impact across the disciplines: identifying ‘Changemaker’ attributes,” Higher Education, Skills and Work-based Learning, vol. 5, no. 3, 2015, doi: 10.1108/HESWBL-10-2014-0051.
[5] S. Teasdale, M. J. Roy, R. Ziegler, S. Mauksch, P. Dey, and E. B. Raufflet, “Everyone a Changemaker? Exploring the Moral Underpinnings of Social Innovation Discourse Through Real Utopias,” Journal of Social Entrepreneurship, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 417–437, 2021, doi: 10.1080/19420676.2020.1738532.
[6] C. Bandinelli and A. Arvidsson, “Brand Yourself a Changemaker!,” Journal of Macromarketing, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 67–71, 2013, doi: 10.1177/0276146712465186. (Record verified; text not obtained — cited only as evidence that the term has been examined as a self-branding practice.)
[7] A. García-González and M. S. Ramírez-Montoya, “Social entrepreneurship education: changemaker training at the university,” Higher Education, Skills and Work-based Learning, vol. 11, no. 5, pp. 1236–1251, 2021, doi: 10.1108/HESWBL-01-2021-0009.