Women’s Social Entrepreneurship and Digital Transformation in Diverse Contexts

Closes:
Journal
International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research
Guest editor(s)
Ethné Swartz, Anastacia Mamabolo, Caren Scheepers, Candida G. Brush,

Introduction

The International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research (IJEBR) invites submissions for a special issue on Women’s Social Entrepreneurship and Digital Transformation in Diverse Contexts. The special issue is inspired by the momentum of the 2026 Diana International Research Conference, held at the Gordon Institute of Business Science, University of Pretoria, South Africa, from June 26-29, 2026. The conference theme, “Transforming Futures: Women and Social Entrepreneurship in a Digital Age,” highlighted the growing importance of understanding how women pursue social missions through entrepreneurial action while navigating rapid technological change.

This special issue seeks to move beyond narrow or decontextualized accounts of entrepreneurship. We are particularly interested in research that explains how entrepreneurial behavior is shaped by the intersection of gender, digital transformation, social purpose, and institutional context. Digitalization, AI, and platform technologies are opening new avenues for venture creation, scaling, coordination, and social impact, yet they also reproduce and reshape inequalities in access to capital, markets, legitimacy, and support systems. Women social entrepreneurs often confront these tensions directly, especially in underrepresented settings where market failures, institutional voids, and urgent societal needs create both constraints and opportunities.

Scholarship in the International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research (IJEBR) has made important strides in understanding social entrepreneurship across multiple levels of analysis. At the macro level, research demonstrates how institutional environments shape entrepreneurial activity and how intermediaries influence social entrepreneurial identity and business model innovation (Ghazali et al., 2021; Guerrero et al., 2021). At the meso level, work has foregrounded the centrality of collaboration and networks within social entrepreneurship ecosystems, as well as the persistent financing constraints that limit venture growth (Kosmynin, 2022; Parekh and Attuel-Mendès, 2022). At the individual level, attention has turned to the cognitive and motivational drivers of social entrepreneurial behavior, including compassion, opportunity recognition, and contextual embeddedness (Stirzaker et al., 2021; Mir and Natasha, 2019). Despite this progress, the intersections of gender, digital transformation, and social entrepreneurship, particularly in non-Western contexts, remain undertheorized. This special issue builds on and extends this body of work by centering women’s social entrepreneurship in an era of rapid technological change, addressing gaps that existing scholarship has yet to fill. 

Building on this rich foundation, this special issue seeks to extend scholarship by foregrounding women’s social entrepreneurship during a period of rapid digital transformation. How do these phenomena impact entrepreneurial behavior, determine access to scarce resources, and social impact across diverse cultural, institutional, and economic contexts? What research and knowledge gaps exist on women-led social entrepreneurship in the Global South? How do women social entrepreneurs navigate gendered ecosystems, uneven digital infrastructure, limited financial inclusion, and rapidly evolving technology landscapes? Digital technologies and Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly central to entrepreneurship in emerging economies (GSMA, 2024), enabling women entrepreneurs to leverage these technologies to overcome structural barriers, scale social impact, and engage marginalized communities in new ways (Suseno & Abbott, 2021). 

This special issue seeks to advance IJEBR debates by examining how digital transformation reshapes women’s social entrepreneurial behavior, opportunity recognition, and resource mobilization across diverse contexts, and extend existing theories of social entrepreneurship to contexts characterized by institutional complexity, digital leapfrogging, and persistent gender inequality. We welcome work that develops, tests, or challenges theory related to women’s social entrepreneurship, digitally enabled venturing, entrepreneurial ecosystems, and the broader human and social dynamics of entrepreneurship. We encourage contributions from a wide range of epistemological and methodological traditions, including conceptual papers, qualitative studies, quantitative analyses, and mixed-method designs. We especially welcome submissions from and about contexts that remain less visible in mainstream entrepreneurship research, including Africa and the Global South, as well as comparative work that questions Western-centered assumptions.

Potential contributions may examine how women identify and enact socially oriented opportunities; how digital tools and AI influence venture emergence, scaling, legitimacy, and impact; how ecosystems, finance, law, and policy enable or constrain women-led social ventures; and how social entrepreneurship affects beneficiaries, communities, and systems of inclusion or exclusion. Submissions are open to all scholars and are not limited to conference participants. All papers will undergo IJEBR’s standard peer review process and should speak clearly to the journal’s interest in entrepreneurial behavior and its social context.

List of Topic Areas

  • Social entrepreneurship and digitization: opportunities and challenges at the intersection of innovation, technology, and AI
  • AI adoption among women social entrepreneurs: leveraging emerging technologies to address grand societal challenges
  • Impact investing and risk capital: emerging innovations in the funding stack for women-led social enterprises
  • Women’s social entrepreneurship and hybrid organizing
  • Theorizing women’s entrepreneurial activity in the Global South: applicability of Western-centered entrepreneurship theory and feminism, and the role of context-specific phenomena in shaping women’s social entrepreneurial activity
  • Women social entrepreneurs as key actors: cognitive processes, mental frameworks, resilience, and the navigation of challenges in social entrepreneurship
  • Organizational forms, business models, and strategies: novel approaches to leading, structuring, and organizing social enterprises by women entrepreneurs
  • Intersectionality and justice: the influences of race, class, ethnicity, and geography on women’s entrepreneurial experiences
  • Methodological innovations for studying women’s entrepreneurial behavior
  • Comparative and cross-national studies of women-led social ventures

Submission Information

Submissions of full manuscripts are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available here:

Submit via ScholarOne

Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Please see:

Author guidelines

Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to “Please select the issue you are submitting to”.

Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.

Key Dates

Opening date for manuscript submissions: 1 September 2026

Closing date for manuscript submissions: 31 January 2027

 

References

Ghazali, E.M., Mutum, D.S. and Haleh, H.J. (2021), “The impact of the institutional environment and experience on social entrepreneurship: a multi-group analysis”, International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, 27(5), pp. 1329–1350. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJEBR-11-2020-0782

GSMA (2024). The Mobile Gender Gap Report 2024. Available at: https://www.gsma.com/r/gender-gap-2024/

Guerrero, M., Santamaría-Velasco, C.A. and Mahto, R. (2021), “Intermediaries and social entrepreneurship identity: implications for business model innovation”, International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, 27(2), pp. 520–546. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJEBR-07-2020-0492

Kosmynin, M. (2022), “Social entrepreneurship organisations and collaboration: taking stock and looking forward”, International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, 28(2), pp. 441–470. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJEBR-02-2021-0133

Mir, S.S. and Natasha, S. (2019), “Individual social entrepreneurship orientation: towards development of a measurement scale”, Asia Pacific Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 13(1), pp. 49–72. https://doi.org/10.1108/APJIE-06-2018-0036

Parekh, N. and Attuel-Mendès, L. (2022), “Social entrepreneurship finance: the gaps in an innovative discipline”, International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, 28(1), pp. 83–108. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJEBR-04-2020-0237

Stirzaker, R., Galloway, L., Muhonen, J. and Christopoulos, D. (2021), “The drivers of social entrepreneurship: agency, context, compassion and opportunism”, International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, 27(6), pp. 1381–1402. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJEBR-05-2020-0294

Suseno, Y. & Abbott, L., 2021. Women entrepreneurs’ digital social innovation: Linking gender, entrepreneurship, social innovation and information systems.  Information Systems Journal. 31:5, 717-744