The Dark Side of Doing Good

The dark side of doing good: a guiding framework for advancing research on the negative outcomes of social entrepreneurship examines a largely overlooked dimension of social entrepreneurship: its potential negative outcomes. While these initiatives aim to address societal challenges by combining social missions with entrepreneurial approaches, their actions can sometimes produce unintended harmful effects. The study introduces a framework that helps identify who may be negatively affected by these initiatives and what types of losses may occur, ranging from health and well-being to social and financial resources. By highlighting how efforts to solve complex social problems can inadvertently create new vulnerabilities, the paper encourages a more balanced understanding of social entrepreneurship and offers a tool to help researchers, practitioners and policymakers anticipate and mitigate these unintended consequences.