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AbstractThe business, management, and entrepreneurship (BME) education provided by universities is believed to influence the way in which organisations are managed in the business world. In recent decades, it has been criticised for its focus on profit and short-term goals, while new approaches inspired by the humanities, particularly religious and spiritual traditions, have been proposed. Although research in this area is growing, it is scattered. In this study, we systematically review the existing literature to deepen our understanding of this emergent stream of research. From a sample of 216 papers, 51 articles from 1996 to 2023, selected from the Web of Science and Scopus databases, are analysed. Overall, the findings highlight that the literature on this topic is predominantly theoretical and suggest that some of the wisdom embedded in religion and spirituality might be considered to inform different discussions in BME courses, with a prominent application of sacred and ancient texts in the teaching of business ethics. Future research avenues are discussed in relation to a variety of themes and pedagogical and empirical approaches that can benefit scholars and advance this area of study.

PurposeThis paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of the phenomenon of social entrepreneurship, paying special attention to the new narratives that are emerging about this phenomenon in the context of Africa.Design/methodology/approachThe paper addresses this issue, by comparing the meanings of what is called "social" in this context and in developed areas. The paper's particular interest in the use of language and narratives is grounded in the experience of how narratives and stories are genuinely constitutive and perfomative of people's actions.FindingsThis paper reveals that "social" in the social entrepreneurship narratives does not necessarily have the same meaning in different contexts. Specifically, when the phenomenon is re‐interpreted in the context of the discourses that come from a developing area such as South Africa, it adds flexibility and a more local sense to the entrepreneurs' social missions.Research limitations/implicationsThe study was affected by the limited availability of published data on social entrepreneurship in Africa. Economic challenges and failures by governments to access donor funds have resulted in militant governance thereby reducing the role of social entrepreneurship to negligible levels.Originality/valueThe study provides a narrative lens of looking at the challenges that social entrepreneurship is facing in Africa.

Narrative is an important tool for developing and writing up action research experiences. Its power lies in the fact that narrative construction and narrative recounting are fundamental human communication practices. Narratives are also knowledge producing devices, since they make sense of personal experiences and share that sense-giving with others. However, the twinned duality of narrative knowing (sense-making) and narrative telling (communicating that sense) has often caused narrative as a methodological approach to be disregarded or misunderstood. Our objective is to reflect on how we can best use the narrative method in action research by paying due attention to these issues. In doing so, we consider ontologies, epistemologies and key characteristics. We argue that what has been seen as a weakness in the narrative method, its deep subjectivity, can actually be employed as an analytical strength in action research. We show how examining explanations of context, inherent in narrative processes, can provide rich insights into the meanings of phenomena.