Marthe Nyssens

Social enterprise in Europe: recent trends and developments

Purpose – Twelve years ago, the concept of social enterprise was rarely discussed in Europe, however it is now making significant breakthroughs in European Union (EU) countries. Within this context, the purpose of this paper is to synthesize major evolutions experienced by social enterprises across Europe and the key challenges they are facing; and specific members of the EMES European Research Network provide a more in‐depth update as to current trends and debates in their respective countriesDesign/methodology/approach – This paper is based on a comparative analysis of the different institutions (legal frameworks, public policies, supporting structures, public procurement policies …) which support the development of social enterprises in the different EU countries. To delimit the field, the paper relies on the “ideal‐type” social enterprise as defined by the EMES network: “Social enterprises are not‐for‐profit private organizations providing goods or services directly related to their explicit aim to be...

Conceptions of Social Enterprise and Social Entrepreneurship in Europe and the United States: Convergences and Divergences

Abstract The concepts of social enterprise and social entrepreneurship are making amazing breakthroughs in EU countries and the United States. Until recently, the debates on both sides of the Atlantic have taken place in parallel trajectories with few connections among them. In the first part of the paper, we describe the European and US historical landscapes in which those concepts took root. In the second part, we analyse how the various conceptualizations have evolved. This analysis paves the way for the third part, in which we highlight the conceptual convergences and divergences among regions as well as within the US and European landscapes.

Social enterprise in Europe: At the crossroads of market, public policies and third sector

Abstract Over the last 15 years, the concept of social enterprise has been raising an increasing interest in various regions of the world. In the present paper, we describe, first, the European historical landscapes in which the concept of social enterprise took root. In the second part, we analyze the various public policies introduced in several European countries. In the third part, we analyse the logics of financing of social enterprises. Based on the EMES conception of social enterprise, we underline the “hybridization” of their resources. European social enterprises indeed, most often, combine income from sales with public subsidies linked to their social mission and private donations and/or volunteering. This clearly contrasts with a strong US tendency to define social enterprises as non-profit organizations more oriented towards the market and developing “earned income strategies” as a response to decreasing public subsidies and to the limits of private grants from foundations.

Quasi‐marketisation in domiciliary care: varied patterns, similar problems?

Purpose – This paper seeks to explore various types of quasi‐market governance in domiciliary elderly care with an interest in both the institutional variety of these governance arrangements and their assumable consequences, against the twofold background of the EU care policy agenda and the Nordic experience.Design/methodology/approach – Based on evidence from four Western European countries, the paper examines how recent reforms have changed the provision of domiciliary care, including the shape of vertical and horizontal governance arrangements. Moreover, summarizing results of previous research and drawing on theoretical reflections rooted both in economics and sociology, the paper discusses the wider impact of these reforms.Findings – The analysis points to country‐specific limitations of the quasi‐market approach regarding issues such as the work‐life balance of carers and the access to adequate services.Originality/value – By combining different scientific approaches and exploring several instituti...

Solidarity - Based Third Sector Organizations in the "Proximity Services" Field : a European Francophone Perspective

This article reviews the role of third sector organizations in the field of “proximity services” from a francophone perspective. We analyze how the new wave of initiatives inside the third sector in France and francophone Belgium can be seen as providing institutional responses to state and market failures that arise from trust-dependent and quasi-collective attributes of these services. These initiatives are often called “solidarity based third sector organizations,” a concept defined in this paper. A central assumption of this analysis is that the political context in which these services are delivered is especially important, particularly as reflected in the changing regulatory role of the state. This analysis takes, therefore, an economic sociology perspective.

Conceptions of Social Enterprise in Europe:, A Comparative Perspective with the United States

The concepts of ‘social enterprise’, ‘social entrepreneurship’ and ‘social entrepreneur’ were almost unknown or at least unused some 20 or even ten years ago. In the last decade, however, they have become much more discussed on both sides of the Atlantic, especially in EU countries and the United States. They are also attracting increasing interest in other regions, such as east Asia (Defourny and Kim, 2011) and Latin America.

Social innovation, social economy and social enterprise: what can the European debate tell us?: Collective Action, Social Learning and Transdisciplinary Research

1990s when the term began to be increasingly used in both Western europe and the United States. Indeed, the third sector, be it called the non- profit sector, the voluntary sector or the social economy, has long witnessed entrepreneurial dynamics which resulted in innovative solutions for providing services or goods to persons or communities whose needs were neither met by private companies nor by public providers. however, for reasons which vary from region to region, the concept of social enterprise is now gaining a fast growing interest along with two closely related terms, namely ‘social entrepreneur’ and ‘social entrepreneurship’. Social innovation, or at least innovation to provide answers to social needs, seems to be at the heart of the fast developing literature around those ‘Se concepts’. So it makes sense to question more deeply the actual links which may exist between the corpus of social enterprise research and the social innovation dynamics as defined in this book’s introduction through three major features: the satisfaction of human needs, the relations between humans in general and between social groups in particular, and the empowerment of people trying to fulfil their needs, this third feature being seen as a bridge between the first and the second. For doing so, we first contextualize the emerging Se concepts, especially highlighting their different roots and subsequent schools of thought both in the United States and europe. While doing this, we try to show the extent to which social innovation has a place and a role in such streams of literature (Section 3.2). Then, we analyse more deeply the eMeS conceptualization of social enterprise. The eMeS approach to social enterprise has been developed by a group of european scholars and is anchored in the european tradition of social economy (Section 3.3). The specificity of the eMeS approach is to approach social enterprises dynamics both by its aim, the primacy of social aim and its process through democratic governance echoing the different dimensions of social innovation (Section 3.4). Finally, we develop the issue of the links between public policies and the diffusion of social innovation in the field of social enterprise. For that purpose, we rely on one of the main eMeS research projects in the field of work integration social enterprise (Section 3.5).

Popular economy in the south, third sector in the north: are they signs of a germinating economy of solidarity?

This article compares some components of the so-called informal sector in countries of the North and of the South. We establish a parallel between the movements of the popular economy in the South and the social economy (third sector) in the North (Santiago de Chile and Belgium are the respective illustrative cases). Although the institutional contexts differ, we emphasize the similarities in evolution induced by the corresponding modes of regulation. Both the popular economy developing in the large cities of the Third World and the nonprofit organizations emerging in the North are a challenge to dominant modes of regulation, in particular to the ‘state–market synergy’. Both have also given rise to an abundant literature which puts theoretical frameworks, particularly the economists, into question. Modes of regulation still remain locked into the market/nonmarket dilemma, and this seems to indicate a certain ‘blindness’ to the plurality of modes of organization which are intermeshed in socio-economic life. We would like to overcome this binary picture and show the fruitfulness of an approach to economics which takes into account a mixture of principles. Such combinations exclude neither the market nor the state, but do not reduce to them. This draws out the contours of a new mode of economic regulation, one which certainly challenges the philosophy of ‘all to the market’, but whose potential is nevertheless rooted in existing economic practices.

UNDERSTANDING COOPERATIVE FINANCE AS A NEW COMMON

The emerging field of common good socio-economics is promising not only for the preservation of common natural resources but also for common goods created by people through collective action, the importance of which has been emphasized by the recent financial and economic crisis. Based on the case of cooperative finance, this paper’s outcomes are threefold. First, it demonstrates that financial cooperatives can be understood as a human-made common. Second, it shows that while the boundaries between the nature and property regime of goods may be relatively clear for natural common goods, they appear much more interlinked for human-made goods, where commons are embedded in intergenerational reciprocity. Third, the paper proposes a new way of thinking about public policies and shows the need to recognize financial cooperatives as human-made commons so as to design adequate legislation to protect these commons from isomorphism, privatization and destruction.

Embeddedness, cooperation and popular-economy firms in the informal sector

This paper is motivated by empirical observations on popular-economy firms (PEFs) in the informal sector of Santiago de Chile. These are labor-managed firms embedded in popular milieu where cooperation between their members plays a central role. This paper develops a (partial equilibrium) microeconomic theory of PEFs. First, it endogeneizes the level of cooperation between the workers. Second, it develops a static and a dynamic model to analyze whether embeddedness influences the behavior of the PEF. Embeddedness is assumed to be captured by three different characteristics suggested by the empirical observations. Most of them influence the employment and income levels in the PEF.