Sustainable Social Entrepreneurship and Digital Technologies: A Systematic Literature Review and Research Agenda
摘要
The integration of sustainable social entrepreneurship with digital technologies represents a burgeoning field of research, reflecting the imperative to address pressing social and environmental challenges through innovative business solutions. This paper provides a comprehensive systematic literature review to elucidate the intersection of sustainable social entrepreneurship and digital technologies, identifying key themes, trends, and research gaps. By analyzing peer-reviewed articles published between 2015 and 2023 in journals indexed in WoS and Scopus, this review highlights how digital technologies are being leveraged to create, manage, and scale socially and environmentally sustainable ventures. The findings identify 52 published studies and suggest that digital platforms facilitate broader reach and engagement, enhance transparency, and improve operational efficiencies, thereby amplifying the impact of social enterprises. Additionally, the review uncovers the critical role of digital literacy and infrastructure in enabling and constraining the potential of digital solutions in this domain. Based on the systematic review, this article proposes a research agenda to address these gaps, recommending longitudinal studies to assess the enduring impacts of digital interventions, cross-sector analyses to explore synergies between different industries, and an ethical framework to guide the responsible use of digital technologies in social entrepreneurship. This agenda aims to foster a deeper understanding of how digital innovations can be strategically employed to advance sustainable development goals, thereby contributing to both academic scholarship and practical advancements in the field of sustainable social entrepreneurship.