The De Gruyter Handbook of Social Entrepreneurship Research responds to the growing need to understand social entrepreneurship as a dynamic, contested, and globally diverse field of inquiry. Bringing together leading scholars from across disciplines and regions, the Handbook moves beyond narrow definitions to examine how social value is imagined, organised, and contested across different institutional, cultural, and technological contexts. More than a synthesis of existing knowledge, the Handbook prefigures a more plural, reflexive, and globally grounded future for the field by bringing into conversation perspectives that have often developed in parallel. It highlights how social entrepreneurs, communities, and organisations enact desired and alternative futures in the present through innovative forms of organising, governance, and collective action.

A distinctive contribution of the Handbook is its focus on digitally enabled social entrepreneurship. The volume prefigures emerging debates around digital social innovation by exploring how platforms, data infrastructures, artificial intelligence, and digital networks are reshaping participation, coordination, and value creation. At the same time, it critically engages with tensions surrounding inclusion, power, surveillance, governance, and sustainability, positioning digital entrepreneurship as a key arena through which future social arrangements are negotiated and enacted.

The Handbook also prefigures a shift in the geography of knowledge production by placing the Global South at the centre of theorising. Through themes such as institutional experimentation, inclusive markets, Indigenous knowledge, resource-constrained innovation, and community-led transformation, it demonstrates how Global South contexts generate novel concepts, alternative models of organising, and promising directions for the future of social entrepreneurship research.

Autorentext

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 infrastructuressuch as digital platforms, data architectures, and distributed networksenable 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 inand actively regenerategeographic 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.