Lars Hulgård

Social economy and social enterprise: an emerging alternative to mainstream market economy?

The social policy agenda will be marked by an ageing population on a global scale and by increased and diversified expectations from citizens in the need of work and social service in the decades to come. Public budgets for social service such as health, education and welfare including social work practice will be put under increasing pressure. There is a difference between a social economy approach to the third sector and an approach based upon the notion of a non-profit constraint. Social economy is well positioned as a third sector to play a core role in meeting this urgency. But how does the social economy fit with current strategies in the areas of welfare policies and social service? Is it as a certain type of social entrepreneurship an integral part of a social innovation of the mainstream market economy or is it part of an emerging counter discourse in the sense of a participatory non-capitalist economy in the area of social service and social innovation? This paper will define social economy in relation to third sector, and argue that it must be seen as a distinct type of social practice as well as being inter-related to social enterprise and social entrepreneurship.

Inovação social: rumo a uma mudança experimental na política pública?

Since the early 1990s, the process of privatization and marketization of public policy led to the individualization and fragmentation of programs, but it also gave the opportunity for strengthening the structure of civil society and the expansion of its capacity to intervene in social reality. Social innovation and social entrepreneurship arise as important factors for the renewal of the welfare state. The change in social structure was studied by the EMES-European Research Network from the perspective of the emergence of a new type of social entrepreneurship and social enterprise. There are studies that define social innovation and social entrepreneurship as distinct concepts, but in this article we will define them almost as synonymous in that they both combine the creation of social value with change and consider the need for integration between process and outcome. In the light of this theoretical approach, social entrepreneurship and social innovation in public policy are closely related to the participatory and democratic structures of government and emerge at the intersection of state, market and civil society. The Nordic countries show a trend of active support from the state to civil society but in Brazil the emergence of social entrepreneurial principles starting from the end of the 1980s, with the universalization and democratization of public policy. That led to a significant number of trials of new participatory and integrated institutional arrangements from the principles of decentralization, social control and participation of civil society, which can be regarded as a process of social innovation. Key words: social innovation, social entrepreneurship, public policy, participation.