Building a better tomorrow – Bridging the disconnect between policy, practice, education and research in social enterprise

The importance of social enterprise is becoming increasingly evident across societies, economies and local communities, and ‘the past decade has witnessed a surge of research interest in social entrepreneurship’ (Saebi, Foss and Linder, 2019, p.70). In Ireland, the development of the social enterprise policy in 2019 was welcomed as an important indicator of the growth and importance of this sector. Furthermore, burgeoning networks, ecosystems and research all indicate the widespread development of this sector across many towns, cities and villages nationally. Fundamental to social enterprise is social impact, and at a time when the world is facing signifi cant global challenges Halsall, Oberoi and Snowden (2020, p. 80) note that ‘social enterprise is a key player in societal changes’. Given the potential impact of social enterprises, there are many benefi ts in exploring how they can play a vital role in creating a sustainable, inclusive and resilient future by addressing the signifi cant local and global challenges of the sustainable development goals. While the fi eld of study on social entrepreneurship has progressed at the researcher, educator, practitioner and policy perspectives, it is still somewhat fragmented and lacks a cohesive integrated perspective. This individual stakeholder approach has left work on social entrepreneurship a loosely connected domain of issues often resulting in singular representation of endeavors. Social entrepreneurship when viewed as a multidisciplinary and collaborative partnership approach presents a rich environment for practical knowledge exchange and co-creation and the development of support infrastructures to advance theory, practice, policy and competency development interventions (educational and training). This special issue provides a vehicle for one of many such potential cocreations and collaborations. The call for papers for this issue arose from cross institutional collaboration between the editors who have been working in the social enterprise space and wanted to provide a forum for scholars, practitioners and policy makers to come together to explore key issues of concern. In the fi rst instance we ran a Social Enterprise Symposium at the annual Irish Academy of Management conference in 2021 and launched an open call for this special edition. We had great interest from the academic and researcher community to share their research in this growing and important topic, which has resulted in seven papers which will be showcased across two issues in the Irish Journal of Management (this issue and the forthcoming next issue). The papers come from policy makers and researchers and cover a wide range of topics, and perspectives which demonstrate the knowledge and expertise that exists among this embryonic research community. An overview of the papers which are in this special issue will now be outlined, which is supplemented with a summary of a book chapter, which further identifi es the future potential for research is this fi eld.