The contributors focus on the individual, organisational, and institutional levels of social entrepreneurship, addressing the role of personal values and leadership in the conduct of initiatives while stressing the importance of stakeholders in relation to human resource management, innovation, or opportunity discovery.

Most social ventures cross the boundaries between the private, the public and the non-profit/voluntary sectors, and this broad involvement of actors and intertwining of sectors makes the label 'societal' entrepreneurship more appropriate. Stating the importance of both the local and the broader societal context, the book reports close-up studies from a variety of social ventures. Generic themes include positioning societal entrepreneurship against other images of collective entrepreneurship, critically penetrating its assumptions and practices and proposing ways of promoting societal entrepreneurship more widely.