Worlds beyond scale: Social entrepreneurship and the pluralisation of social value

Abstract

This article critically examines the epistemic and normative foundations of scaling social value in social entrepreneurship. Over the past two decades, scaling has become a dominant ideal, routinely equated with success, effectiveness, and legitimacy. We argue that this monocultural fixation on growth narrows what can be seen, valued, and supported as ‘social’, obscuring the relational, contextual, and plural character of social value creation. Drawing on critical and decolonial scholarship, we show how prevailing scaling logics generate counterproductive outcomes by privileging replication and expansion whilst rendering alternative forms of social value creation invisible or illegitimate. In response, we advance the ecology of trans-scales as an alternative epistemological orientation that reconceptualises scaling as a relational and dialogical process, rather than a unidirectional, necessary trajectory of growth. We identify four elements that sustain this epistemic turn in social entrepreneurship: trans-scalar linkages, epistemic humility, politics of mutual intelligibility, and plural evaluation of scale effects. Together, these elements reframe scaling as a process of connection, translation, and negotiation across scales, offering a pathway beyond the monoculture of scale in social entrepreneurship research and practice.