Social Entrepreneurship (SE) in the Global South is often framed as a recent innovation introduced through Global North–driven development programmes. This perspective overlooks the long-standing and locally embedded practices of SE in these regions. Business history, emphasising contextual analysis and examining long-term change, offers essential tools for uncovering the diverse trajectories and meanings of SE. Yet, business historians have only recently started to engage with SE beyond the Global North. Through a narrative review, this article connects the dots between existing business history research on SE and work from adjacent social science disciplines such as entrepreneurship and development studies. It highlights both the strengths and limitations of current approaches and identifies underexplored areas, such as grassroots and Indigenous forms of SE. The article concludes by outlining future research directions that foreground local agency, offer alternative visions of social impact and expand the conceptual boundaries of SE within business history.

This paper examines the Finnish state-owned company Valco (1976–1980), launched as the flagship of an initiative to promote the electronics industry. From the outset, Valco faced major challenges and ultimately failed, becoming both a symbol of the limits of state ownership and a catalyst for change in industrial policy. The study argues that Valco’s most enduring legacy lay not in its operations but in its reputation: genuine difficulties gave rise to a negative image that evolved into a lasting stigma. It analyses the rationale for Valco’s creation, the causes of its failure, and the public construction of its image. The paper makes three contributions. First, it offers deeper insight into the characteristics and constraints of state ownership as an industrial policy instrument. Second, it shows how failure can be repurposed rhetorically to legitimise policy change. Third, it reveals how Valco’s stigma obscured its effects on ownership governance and technological expertise in Finland.

This article traces the evolution of paternalism at Michelin from 1889 to 2024. Rather than disappearing with the welfare state and modern management, Michelin’s paternalism persisted through change and adaptation. Using archival materials, we trace how Michelin combined material care, emotional attachment, and symbolic practices to maintain control over its workforce across four periods. We propose a framework that distinguishes between the stable and changing elements of paternalistic management by showing that while tools and techniques evolved, the underlying structure of moral authority and worker alignment endured. The article advances business history debates, first by illustrating how forms of managerial control can survive institutional change by adjusting to new expectations, reconsidering the place of affect, identity, and belonging in the history of corporate governance, and second, by offering a longterm perspective on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), showing how Michelin’s paternalism prefigured CSR by embedding social concerns into corporate strategy.

This article explores social entrepreneurship (SE) historically, focusing on the interplay between the US entrepreneurial state, WWII geopolitics, and shifting gender roles. Drawing on the historiography of Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, it traces how SE has historically unfolded as a collective, collaborative, and open endeavour capable of driving social transformation. Hopper’s work in computing reveals three situated SE practices: stepping into the labour market, engaging in creative problem-solving in the margins, and building community through reaching out. By engaging bell hooks’s concept of the margin as a space of radical openness, the article shows how women were granted access to centre in ways that redefined possibilities for transformation. Hopper’s SE made programming languages accessible rather than monopolised systems and challenged gendered boundaries in the ICT field. The article highlights the changing meanings of SE over time and reclaims its roots in democratic, inclusive practices that enable broader social transformations.

While archives are common in developed countries, it is generally recognised that they are lacking in developing countries. To cope with the challenges faced by a 500-year-old water irrigation system in a semi-arid region in the south of Morocco, we demonstrate that the absence of archives invites methodological exploration, making the invention of new sources, especially visuals, inevitable. They serve as mnemonic devices for keeping track of community water management infrastructures. Documenting actors’ reconstruction of organisational memory reveals new memory categories: communal, community-based, common, and historicised memory. Inspired by the eight principles of Ostrom’s theory on the commons, our case study also shows that the governance of commons cannot last beyond one generation ­without a process of organisational re-membering. Organisational re-membering, as the ninth principle of the commons theory, induces memory as well as a renewed community membership.