Social Entrepreneurship Education Literature: An Ecological Narrative Review

Abstract

In this paper, we provide a narrative review of thirteen years of literature about Social Entrepreneurship Education (SEE). To grasp its controversies, the main topics of interest and evolutions across time and space (i.e., influences from other communities), we build on a socioecological view of ecosystems and their underlying resilience processes. We find that researchers and educators from the SEE ecosystem imported concepts from other communities to flesh out the three challenges identified by Tracey and Phillips in 2007: managing accountability, managing the double bottom line, and managing identity. We contribute to unveiling the tacit paradigms of the SEE ecosystem and their origins: the teaching objectives and the tools that are deemed adequate to achieve them, while remaining critical of the origin of such elements. This exercise highlights possible vulnerabilities that SEE educators could address in the future as well as promising research opportunities.