How social value is created: A multi-level framework from the social entrepreneurship literature

Social entrepreneurship research has grown quickly but developed as a loosely connected literature, leaving its overall structure unclear. This study examines 488 journal articles forming Indian social entrepreneurship scholarship, indexed in Scopus between 1996 and 2025, combining performance analysis with keyword cooccurrence, co-citation, and bibliographic coupling. The field addresses three concerns, the individual entrepreneur, the enterprise, and the institutional context, which differ sharply in influence: individual-focused work is highly cited but peripheral, organizational work is large but less cited, and context-focused work is newest and smallest yet most cited, despite lacking a distinct theoretical foundation. Attention is shifting from finance-centered development toward sustainability, value creation, and digitalization. Weighting the field’s structure by influence and reading it across levels of analysis, the study extends multilevel accounts of social entrepreneurship through a framework of three linking mechanisms and three boundary conditions, and advances six testable propositions to guide future research.