Over the last decades, in parallel to major changes towards privatization in the welfare regimes of advanced industrialized countries, social innovation, social enterprise and social entrepreneurship have gradually become "à la mode". They are interpreted in policy documents in market-economic terms, making social enterprises a valuable partner for policy makers looking for innovative ways of addressing social and societal problems, among which bringing the excluded back into society and increasing social cohesion. However, balancing active citizenship and empowerment, on the one hand, and market-based social service delivery and innovation in a sustainable manner, on the other, represents a daunting challenge.
In this context, social innovation is conceived as creative solutions to existing wicked social problems, at the level of both concrete outcome and process; and social enterprises are heralded as vehicles for such societal improvement. However, beyond the superficial approaches to social innovation, its relationship with social enterprises and social entrepreneurship remains to be better understood and systematized. Therefore, the series invites contributions that are committed to understanding the complexity of these transformations by engaging in new dialogues within and among all regions of the world, each with its specific historical, cultural, social and political contexts, as well as among disciplines, as these evolutions must be tackled in their multi-dimensional nature.
Edited
By Ana Margarida Fernandes Esteves, Tom Henfrey, Luciane Lucas dos Santos, Leonardo Leal
October 20, 2023
Solidarity economy-based alternative spaces result from an interface among structural factors, institutional regimes and forms of collective action that mobilise narratives of change, collective identities and non-capitalist economic practices. This book analyses how solidarity economy initiatives ...
Edited
By Michael Roy, Jane Farmer
May 31, 2023
In recent decades, governments have promoted social enterprise as a means to address welfare and tackle disadvantage. Early academic work on social enterprises reflected this development and engaged with their ability to deliver and create jobs, work towards remedial environmental goals, and ...
Edited
By Jacques Defourny, Marthe Nyssens
January 09, 2023
In the last two decades, the quest for a widely accepted definition of social enterprise has been a central issue in a great number of publications. The main objective of the ICSEM Project on which this book is based was to show that the social enterprise field would benefit much more from linking ...
Edited
By Sara Calvo, Andrés Morales
September 26, 2022
The Latin American continent contains an incredibly rich diversity from which humans derive a range of ecosystem services (e.g. material goods, cultural benefits, climate regulation, etc.) that contribute to livelihoods and well-being. It has become critical to reconcile social and environmental ...
Edited
By Jacques Defourny, Marthe Nyssens
August 29, 2022
In the last two decades, the quest for a widely accepted definition of social enterprise has been a central issue in a great number of publications. The main objective of the ICSEM Project (on which this book is based) was to show that the social enterprise field would benefit much more from ...
Edited
By Eric Bidet, Jacques Defourny
March 31, 2021
In the absence of a widely accepted and common definition of social enterprise (SE), a large research project, the "International Comparative Social Enterprise Models" (ICSEM) Project, was carried out over a five-year period; it involved more than 200 researchers from 55 countries and relied on ...
Edited
By Luiz Inácio Gaiger, Marthe Nyssens, Fernanda Wanderley
March 31, 2021
In the absence of a widely accepted and common definition of social enterprise (SE), a large research project, the "International Comparative Social Enterprise Models" (ICSEM) Project, was carried out over a five-year period; it involved more than 200 researchers from 55 countries and relied on ...
Edited
By Philippe Eynaud, Jean-Louis Laville, Luciane dos Santos, Swati Banerjee, Flor Avelino, Lars Hulgård
March 31, 2021
In the past decades, social enterprise has been an emerging field of research. Its main frameworks have been provided by Occidental approaches. Mainly based on an organizational vision, they give little or no room to questions such as gender, race, colonialism, class, power relations and ...
Edited
By Swati Banerjee, Stephen Carney, Lars Hulgard
July 23, 2019
Social Innovation is emerging as an alternate interdisciplinary development pathway of knowledge and practice that aims to understand and address contemporary complexities and multi – dimensional social realities. BEPA (2011) defines social innovation as, ‘innovations that are social in both their ...
By Ralph Richter, Matthias Fink, Richard Lang, Daniela Maresch
June 24, 2019
Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Rural Europe investigates how social entrepreneurship advances social innovation in rural Europe and contributes to fighting social and economic challenges in these regions. Based on longitudinal data collected in four European countries, this book ...
By Helmut Anheier, Gorgi Krlev, Georg Mildenberger
October 25, 2018
Social Innovation: Comparative Perspectives investigates socio-economic impact. Since it is hard to establish causality and to measure social properties when investigating impact, especially at the level of society, the book narrows down impact to one priority aspect: social innovation – understood...
Edited
By Julie Olberding
August 06, 2018
During the past twenty years, the field of nonprofit management has grown significantly in terms of the number of nonprofit organizations, number of people employed, and amount of funds raised. A key activity in nonprofit management has been organizing events, which are generally defined as "...