Marguerite Mendell

Reflections on the evolving landscape of social enterprise in North America

Abstract Social enterprises, at least in the United States, internalize a hybrid mix of public, private and civil society activity, each and all of which are constituent and confluent. Is social enterprise re-embedding the market in civil society through its engagement to generate social wealth, or is it contributing to a process of dis-embedding, as a market-based approach to address societal issues imposes a strategy of commercialization? Simply asking this question demonstrates how difficult it is to capture this phenomenon in a homogeneous “new welfare mix” paradigm that realigns state, market and civil society relations. Not only do national contexts matter, but degrees of marketization or commercialization do as well. This article provides a broad overview of social enterprise in the North American context. In examining the literature on social enterprise, one navigates through a lexicon of numerous terms and definitions.

Impact investing: a preliminary analysis of emergent primary and secondary exchange platforms

The purpose of this article is to present a brief synthesis of the impact investment market as it relates to barriers to the full development of this market. We examine some developments that have emerged to address these barriers. We include a brief overview of the impact investing field and the current landscape of social enterprises, the vast majority of which are non-profit organizations increasingly engaged in business activity. We address the lack of liquidity in this market and the need for secondary markets that enable investor exit. We present a preliminary summary of findings on a few exchange platforms – primary and secondary – that have emerged very recently to coordinate this market in several countries.