De Gruyter Handbook of Social Entrepreneurship Research

The De Gruyter Handbook of Social Entrepreneurship Research responds to a growing need within scholarship and practice to better understand social entrepreneurship as a complex, evolving, and context-sensitive field. Bringing together diverse voices and perspectives, it moves beyond narrow definitions to highlight the plurality, interdisciplinarity, and global scope of contemporary research. Rather than seeking conceptual closure, the volume maps the field’s intellectual trajectories and offers a comprehensive yet accessible entry point into key debates, while prefiguring a more integrated and reflexive research agenda.

A key contribution lies in its focus on digitally enabled social entrepreneurship. By examining how sociotechnical infrastructures—such as platforms, data systems, and digital networks—shape participation, coordination, and value creation, the handbook highlights technology as both an opportunity and a source of new tensions around inclusion, governance, and ethics. This lens offers a timely understanding of how digitalisation is transforming the ways social value is created and sustained.

This handbook also foregrounds marginalised and Global South contexts as sites of both empirical insight and theoretical innovation. By engaging with issues of inequality, institutional complexity, and community agency, it broadens the scope of the field and advances more plural and contextually grounded perspectives.

• The most complete handbook on social entrepreneurship to date
• Offers a holistic and state-of-the-art survey of the field
• Highlights new technologies and emerging areas of research
• Led by world-renowned scholars

Israr Qureshi is Professor of Social Entrepreneurship and Digital Development at the Queen’s Business School, Queen’s University Belfast. His research examines how social entrepreneurship unfolds as a socially embedded and often prefigurative process, with a particular focus on how intermediaries and communities co-create inclusive, participatory, and alternative forms of organising and development. He has made significant contributions to the study of digital social innovation, showing how sociotechnical infrastructures—such as digital platforms, data architectures, and distributed networks—enable new forms of coordination, inclusion, and value creation, particularly in resource-constrained contexts. His work on technoficing further advances this agenda by theorising the use of contextually appropriate, "good enough" technologies that prioritise local participation, sustainability, and alignment with community needs over technological sophistication.

Natalie Slawinski is Professor of Sustainability and Director of the Centre for Regenerative Futures at the Gustavson School of Business, University of Victoria. Her research advances understanding of sustainability, place, temporality, and paradoxes in organizations, with a distinctive emphasis on how social enterprises are embedded in—and actively regenerate—geographic communities through processes of organizing that integrate social, ecological, and economic dimensions. By examining how organizations navigate tensions over time while remaining grounded in place, her work highlights the role of community entrepreneurship, sense of place, and local ecosystems in shaping pathways to sustainable and resilient futures. Natalie serves as an Advisor to Memorial University’s Centre for Social Enterprise and is a Research Fellow at the Cambridge University Judge Business School’s Centre for Social Innovation.

Simon Teasdale is Simon Teasdale is Professor of Management at Queen’s University Belfast. His research examines entrepreneurship as a form of social and political change, focusing on how social enterprises navigate, reshape, and contest institutional and policy environments. He explores how entrepreneurial agency is enacted within complex and often constrained contexts, highlighting how actors both shape and are shaped by the everyday social, spatial, and temporal dynamics of organising. His recent work shows how organisations simultaneously collaborate with, critique, and subtly resist government institutions to expand their space for agency and influence policy outcomes, especially in Global South contexts. Methodologically, he employs innovative combinations of ethnographic, discourse, and network-based approaches to capture the relational, contextual, and processual nature of social innovation and institutional change.