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This paper aims to extend social entrepreneurship theory by investigating the darker sides of innovation and enterprise. Entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship theories regarding shifting equilibriums are considered alongside other traditions. This research presents how individuals see enterprises as dark and light and discusses how such perceptions are important to building emerging theories of light and dark social entrepreneurship.

The study uses a survey of public perceptions (n = 631) regarding the social and economic impact of a total of 15 different enterprises to create a map of the darker variations of enterprises. An 11-point scale was used to evaluate perceived impact.

The mapping of each enterprise on a coordinate plane resulted in four thematic areas: traditional enterprises (light social, light economic), taboo enterprises (dark social, light economic), dark enterprises (dark social, dark economic) and alternative enterprises (light social, dark economic). Some enterprises crossed between the thematic areas.

This study opens up new directions for research on dark social entrepreneurship and research on enterprises that influence social equilibriums.

This study provides guidance for practitioners and policymakers to better understand phenomena such as dark, taboo and alternative enterprises and their nuances.

This study allows for a broader look at social entrepreneurship, innovation and enterprise to better understand dark and light nuances. Similarities between the lighter and darker forms of enterprises are noted.

This study builds on dark entrepreneurship and dark social entrepreneurship theories and concepts using empirical methods.

The purpose of this paper is to add to the existing wealth of knowledge on the benefits and challenges of social entrepreneurship in Egypt, a challenging emerging economy.

The research combines secondary and primary research with the latter including interviews across the public, private and social entrepreneurship sectors, together with surveys to gather Egyptian and international perspectives.

The study addresses several political, cultural and economic themes that significantly influence the emergence and growth of social entrepreneurship organisations in Egypt.

Egypt is undergoing significant change at present; hence, this research provides a snapshot of what may be considered a very dynamic environment.

Recommendations are made that have practical implications for each of the public, private, development and non-profit sectors in Egypt. It is suggested that the public sector ought to unite its efforts under one umbrella organisation, the private sector could benefit from growing social awareness across the region, while development groups should continue to focus on education generally. Non-profit entities can seek to collaborate with others, and all organisations can make better use of developing global communications technology.

A base of social entrepreneurship is already established in Egypt, but this research suggests that further encouragement of these initiatives could help develop the economy and foster a more socially aware culture and political landscape.

Social entrepreneurship in Egypt continues to evolve, and this research identifies a number of economic, cultural and political perspectives that, if addressed, could help accelerate progress.

Entrepreneurship is ubiquitous, but it is not unequivocally a human force for social and economic good. Critical perspectives of the entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurial success (and failure) are evolving in the scholarly literature. Dark side theory has emerged as a language for critiquing the dominant narratives of entrepreneurship portrayed in scholarship, education, planning, policy, and other forms of practice. This chapter draws from dark side entrepreneurship theory, Baumolian entrepreneurship, and exemplars of counterculture to craft language for an emerging theory of misfit entrepreneurship, which consists of misfit entrepreneurs and alternative enterprises. Alternative enterprises and misfit entrepreneurs are conceptualized, and literary examples (i.e., Robin Hood and Song Jiang) and modern-day examples (i.e., Hacker groups) are supplied. The unique actions and impacts of misfit entrepreneurs and alternative enterprises are offered for discussion. This new theory of misfit entrepreneurship leaves readers with exploratory questions that enhance critical perspectives and modern understandings of entrepreneurship today.

Dialogue in Darkness (DID) is a global social enterprise, which provides products and services such as workshops, exhibitions and activities in the dark in China. The corporate workshops are designed for companies, institutions and government agencies to provide unique leadership training and some other training in teamwork, communication, innovation and change management. And education workshops are aimed at providing young people with unique leadership training and training in teamwork, innovation and empathy and so on for the educational institutions. Over the past five years, DID, headquartered in Shanghai, has expanded to Beijing, Chengdu and Shenzhen, realizing strategic coverage of East, West, North and South of China. DID achieved break-even within less than one year since its inception. Its sound and healthy development offers an innovative way for the sustainable development of social enterprises.

This paper aims to characterise the “social” in social entrepreneurship (SE) by examining social value creation (SVC) from the perspective of vulnerable beneficiaries within a developing country context. It uses the lens of care ethics to garner insights into SVC based on what beneficiaries care about in their work engagement with social enterprises.

The exploratory paper implements a multiple case study approach to theory building, which considers the rich, real-life developing country context wherein much SVC occurs. Data collection primarily uses in-depth interviews with beneficiaries in accordance with socially sensitive research methodologies involving vulnerable participants.

The findings offer an ethical view of SVC that is premised on what is of value to beneficiaries in SE. The authors find that SVC is a multi-dimensional and reciprocal process that is shaped as beneficiaries work for social enterprises. The reciprocal nature of the process engenders beneficiary altruism, which may heighten vulnerability and lead to the dark side of SE.

Many of the problems SE tries to address are situated in developing countries. The findings may enable social entrepreneurs, policymakers and social enterprise organisations to develop more responsive and more impactful solutions to social problems in developing countries. They further suggest that beneficiaries must not be looked upon merely as passive recipients of value but as active participants in the SVC process.

This paper contributes to critical SE discourse by giving voice to beneficiaries in SE.

There is little doubt that the explosive growth of the cyberspace has provided a wealth of opportunities for a broad range of legal and illegal enterprises. One of the characteristics of the cyberspace is that it removes many barriers (e.g. geographical, accessing potential customers, cost of entry) from the path of savvy entrepreneurs. As such, a new particular brand of entrepreneurs has been born – these are entrepreneurs working at the limits of legality or plainly outside any legal frameworks. The purpose of this work is to explore the area of illegal cyber-entrepreneurship and to illustrate some of the factors that have contributed to its explosive growth over the last two decades.

The work is utilising case studies drawn from literature and news sources to illustrate the theoretical concepts that are being explored. The literature consulted in this work supports the discussion around the areas of entrepreneurship, cyberspace and various aspects related to illegal exploitation of the cyberspace.

The positioning of illegal enterprises within existing theoretical frameworks is explored and a modelling of the characteristics of such enterprises is being proposed. The duality of the opportunities available within the cyberspace is illustrated, with an emphasis on the fact that there will always be a ‘gap’ between the opportunities offered by the cyberspace and the possible illegal nature of some of the entrepreneurial activities that are taking place in this space.

This work explores and positions the illegal entrepreneurial activities taking place in the cyberspace. This contributes to the advancement of knowledge in this area. Given the fast moving nature of this area, there are opportunities for updating this work on a regular basis.

Social media has been gaining importance in recent years as an integral part of entrepreneurs’ business and marketing strategies. At the same time, the entrepreneurial use of social media can lead to dark and negative consequences. This aspect has received less attention in the literature so far. The purpose of this study is to advice entrepreneurial practitioners to balance the sides of pros and cons as being an inherent reality to acknowledge the full scenario of business life and the interplay of diverse influences.

The qualitative interviews focused on the dark side experiences of micro-entrepreneurs on social media and on strategies to protect their private identities and businesses from those dark side effects. For the theoretical classification of dark side experiences, the framework of Baccarella et al. (2018) was used and adapted based on the experiences reported.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the study is one of the first to provide an understanding of the negative experiences micro-entrepreneurs face on social media. The research showed the relevance of five out of the seven dark-side building blocks and identified time as a further influential aspect. Thereby, the authors learn to comprehend the negative sides of social media for micro-operated businesses. The findings highlight the need to understand entrepreneurial social media use with simultaneously negative hazards and economic and social challenges. Addressing the entanglement of the entrepreneurial and private selves of micro-entrepreneurs, the findings demonstrate entrepreneur’s attempts of distancing or cleaning the negativity from their private identities and their businesses.

This paper problematizes dark sides as critical elements in entrepreneurial practice, which are too often neglected when discussing entrepreneurial marketing in general and entrepreneurship in social media specifically. The self is always captured between two sides, including the problematic (“dark”) and the bright.

Commonly referred to as dark tourism or thanatourism, the act of touristic travel to sites of or sites associated with death and disaster has gained significant attention with media imaginations and academic scholarship. However, despite a growing body of literature on the representation and tourist experience of deathscapes within the visitor economy, dark tourism as a field of study is still very much in its infancy. Moreover, questions remain of the academic origins of the dark tourism concept, as well as its contribution to the broader social scientific study of tourism and death education. Thus, the purpose of this invited review for this Special Issue on dark tourism, is to offer some critical insights into thanatourism scholarship.

This review paper critiques the emergence and current direction of dark tourism scholarship.

The author suggests that dark tourism as an academic field of study is where death education and tourism studies collide and, as such, can offer potentially fruitful research avenues within the broad realms of thanatology. Secondly, the author outlines how dark tourism as a conceptual typology has been subject to a sustained marketization process within academia over the past decade or so. Consequently, dark tourism is now a research brand in which scholars can locate a diverse range of death‐related and tourist experience studies. Finally, the author argues that the study of dark tourism is not simply a fascination with death or the macabre, but a multi‐disciplinary academic lens through which to scrutinise fundamental interrelationships of the contemporary commodification of death with the cultural condition of society.

This review paper scrutinises dark tourism scholarship and, subsequently, offers original insights into the potential role dark tourism may play in the public representation of death, as well as highlighting broader interrelationships dark tourism has with research into the social reality of death and the significant Other dead.

Attempts to discover an internal logic in the high‐speed events taking place in the former Soviet Union. In addressing the problems of the country′s disintegration, examines the issue in its socioeconomic, political and territorial‐administrative aspects. Analyses, for this purpose, the nature of Soviet society prior to Gorbachev′s reforms, its present transitional stage and its probable direction in the near future.

Nowadays, technostress is a common problem for many organisations. The purpose of this research is to investigate the underlying mechanisms under which enterprise social networks (ESNs) leads to technostress and their consequences.

The authors collected data from 242 employees working in research and development (R&D) centres in India and analysed the data using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM).

The findings of the study contribute to the growing body of knowledge in “dark side of social media research” by researching the phenomenon of higher use of ESNs in organisations and the consequences while theoretically delineating the effect of social, hedonic and cognitive use of ESNs in organisations on technostress, thus extending prior research on adverse impact of social media and technostress research. The results revealed that both ESNs’ need and technostress is adversely related to mental health, performance and greater turnover intention, and perceived organisation support (POS) played a moderating role in this relationship such that with higher POS, employee turnover intention reduces. By uncovering the role of POS as a potential moderator, the findings provide empirical evidence for POS and technostress in organisations, thus offering practical implications for the ESNs strategists, managers and practitioners to develop ESNs’ usage policies to avoid adverse outcomes of technostress in organisations.

This research advances theoretical understanding of the relationship between ESNs, technostress, mental health, performance and turnover” intention while contributing extensively to the technostress literature and to the scholarship of ESNs. In addition, by uncovering the role of perceived organisational support as a potential moderator, this study contributes to the existing literature on POS.

The empirically tested model delivered by this research will enable organisations to understand different excessive usage patterns of ESNs at work, which contribute to negative outcomes for organisations and employees. The findings support the maintenance of social life at work affecting better employee mental health, and the application of cognitive use of ESNs can reduce technostress. Hence, organisational strategies should implement employee policies and interventions that facilitate better work–social life and well-being, simultaneously encouraging usage of ESNs largely for work-related information transmission and sharing within the organisations.

This study constructed a moderated-mediation model by introducing the potential mediating effect of technostress, mental health and performance and the moderating effect of POS to reveal the mechanism through which ESNs related to technostress, mental health, performance and turnover intention in the Indian context.