Navigating the paradox: Empowerment and power dynamics in international social entrepreneurship

Social entrepreneurship (SE) often seeks to empower marginalized beneficiaries by reshaping unequal power relations and promoting more enduring forms of social change. Yet efforts to empower others inherently involve the exercise of power and may therefore reproduce the very asymmetries they seek to overcome. While this “empowerment paradox” has primarily been conceptualized through discrete empowerer-empoweree relationships, considerably less is known about how it unfolds across broader relational systems, particularly in international social entrepreneurship (ISE), where organizations operate across institutional contexts characterized by Global South-North asymmetries. Drawing on a qualitative multi-case study of six ISE ventures, informed by 45 interviews and extensive archival data, we develop an integrative model explaining how the empowerment paradox is structured, experienced, and navigated in these settings. We show that empowerment is organized through multilevel relational chains spanning ecosystem, organizational, and operational levels, that the paradox is experienced differently depending on actors’ positions within these chains, and that organizations navigate persistent tensions through the recursive interplay of relational and structural mechanisms. Building on these findings, we introduce ethical ambidexterity, the capacity to integrate pragmatic and critical orientations toward the use of power, as a means of engaging with rather than resolving the empowerment paradox.