This thesis explores the question how do societies support the organization of entrepreneurship and in turn ensure its positive impact on society? Entrepreneurship and social innovation have become increasingly organized as specialized organizational sponsors (e.g., accelerators), entrepreneurial ecosystems (e.g., Silicon Valley, Silicon Fen), and entrepreneurial ideologies (e.g., ‘building unicorns’) have emerged to support and govern these activities. Despite growing scholarly attention to understanding how interactions within entrepreneurial ecosystems and the broader entrepreneurial field unfold, several important questions are outstanding for research and practice. At the field level, disruptive entrepreneurship has become organized under a common ideology, in which founders are encouraged to pursue market reform while allowing for negative externalities to diffuse in society. With increasing societal concern over these externalities, how might societies transition toward a new normal of responsible entrepreneurship? Paper 1, drawing on institutional and paradox theory, introduces a model of the emergence and governance of entrepreneurial disruption. Importantly, we theorize a set of guardrails which aid in the transition toward responsible entrepreneurship, managing the tensions associated with such a change. At a regional level, how do organizational sponsors maintain entrepreneurial ecosystems? Paper 2 draws on a qualitative case study of an organizations activities to deliver a ‘University Enterprise Zone’ which introduces new support and resources to the ecosystem, alongside advancing efforts to structure the ecosystem. The chapter advances a process of entrepreneurial ecosystem vibrancy amidst tensions between coordination and variety. Finally, with respect to scholarship in entrepreneurship and social innovation, Paper 3 explores what methodological opportunities exist to use systems thinking as an orienting research lens. This chapter explores how systems thinking, when coupled with an attention to leverage points, provides novel opportunities for social innovation scholarship by zooming in and out on non-linearities, unintended consequences, thresholds and boundaries, and multi-level and cross-level interaction. Together, this thesis explores three related questions related to contextual understandings of entrepreneurship, while recognizing the tensions that surface in the societal organization of entrepreneurship more generally.