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.