Integrating Global Knowledge for Dual Value Creation An Interdisciplinary Framework for Practice-Informed Social Entrepreneurship Education

Abstract

Social entrepreneurship (SE) has long demonstrated that social and economic value can be created simultaneously through enterprises generating both community benefit and financial sustainability. Despite the persistence of this practice across cultures, regions, and historical periods, SE scholarship and Social Entrepreneurship Education (SEE) remain fragmented by disciplinary boundaries, competing definitions, and regionally specific models that limit the scaling of SE practice and the development of a coherent and globally applicable SEE approach capable of supporting solutions to complex global problems. This dissertation addresses the absence of an integrated, interdisciplinary, and globally transferable SEE framework aligned with a complementary pedagogical design. Guided by the Interdisciplinary Research Process (IRP) (Repko & Szostak, 2025), the research integrates disciplinary scholarship, regional educational practice, cultural philosophies, and practitioner knowledge. The study was conducted across three research phases, including interdisciplinary theoretical integration, comparative empirical investigation of SEE ecosystems in Manitoba, Prince Edward Island, Croatia, and Slovenia, and iterative implementation and evaluation of the resulting SEE approach across multicultural and multidisciplinary learning environments. The dissertation applies redefinition as an IRP integration strategy to establish a globally applicable understanding of SE practices capable of supporting cross regional investigation. Systems theory and complexity science are subsequently applied as integrative lenses to develop a shared theoretical foundation for interpreting SE as a process emerging through interactions across ecological, social, and economic systems rather than as a normative aspiration. The research further identifies the nested hierarchy of open systems as the broader systems configuration within which social enterprises operate and distinguishes systemic conditions governing cross system interactions from context specific socioeconomic variables shaped through institutional and societal design. The resulting SEE framework organises knowledge into multilevel theoretical and applied domains while distinguishing between globally applicable and context specific knowledge in order to remain transferable across regions and responsive to different cultural contexts. The framework integrates practitioner derived and research derived knowledge within a single educational architecture that was tested and refined through five implementations involving learners across Europe, Asia, North America, and South America. Findings indicate that dual value creation in entrepreneurial practice, is consistently recognised across culturally diverse learner groups and regional contexts, providing preliminary empirical support for the broader applicability of the proposed SEE framework. The dissertation contributes a theoretical proposition positioning SE as a structurally necessary complex phenomenon and social enterprises as complex open systems embedded within a nested hierarchy of open systems, with systemic conditions governing social and economic value creation. The research further proposes a typology of social enterprises distinguishing integration and coordination mechanisms of dual value creation, alongside the integration of cultural philosophies into the SEE knowledge architecture. The findings suggest that culturally grounded traditions across regions independently developed practices aligned with dual value creation long before the emergence of formal SE scholarship. The dissertation concludes by advancing an interdisciplinary integrated SEE framework that may provide a promising direction for further interdisciplinary research, educational design, and the development of SE practice across diverse institutional and cultural contexts.