Anica Zeyen

Emilio Costales

This book illustrates how social entrepreneurship can be used as a tool for addressing grand challenges. Combining leading theoretical insights with rigorous empirical methodologies, the book is the result of field work with 17 social entrepreneurs in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom at various points during the COVID-19 pandemic. Adopting a highly innovative theoretical synthesis to discuss the role of social entrepreneurs as potential agents for positive social change, the book introduces the sociomateriality of space, Luhmann’s systems theory, and the social imaginary as missing building blocks in which disruption is created and navigated for creating positive social change. Concluding with a chapter that focuses on the practicalities of meeting the Sustainable Development Goals, the authors extend scholarship in social entrepreneurship and provide a comprehensive account of insights gained from the pandemic, demonstrating how these insights can enable the navigation of further grand challenges.

Navigating Layers of Disruption from COVID-19 and Beyond

Social Entrepreneurship and Grand Challenges

Markus Beckmann

Social entrepreneurs are change makers that aim to solve society’s unsolved problems. Not surprisingly, social entrepreneurship has thus created high expectations. To better understand the potential as well as the limitations of social entrepreneurship, however, a more nuanced approach is needed in two ways. First, social entrepreneurship is a multi-level phenomenon. It spans macro-level questions as well as meso-level questions and, finally, micro-level questions. If we really want to understand social entrepreneurship, we need to bring together all three levels of analysis and see how they are connected. Second, while social entrepreneurship can certainly produce socially desirable outcomes, we also need a critical perspective to capture potential undesirable effects that social entrepreneurship can cause, often unintendedly, in society, in markets, in organizations, and for individuals. To this end, an ethical perspective can help complement the positive analysis of social entrepreneurship with a discussion of the normative implications of its potential "dark side". Looking at social entrepreneurship from both a multi-level analysis and an ethical perspective, Social Entrepreneurship and Business Ethics takes the reader on a journey through the "bright side" as well as the potential "dark side" of social entrepreneurship for societies, organizations, and individuals. Highlighting both, this book not only seeks to provoke researchers and students to advance their understanding of social entrepreneurship. It also hopes to help practitioners to better realize the positive contributions of social entrepreneurship for society.

Anica Zeyen

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