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This article has two objectives: to clarify the organizational and managerial differences between social entrepreneurship and social enterprises and to investigate the role of social enterprises and their impacts on the welfare systems of European countries. The authors describe social entrepreneurship as a trend across all forms of enterprises and social enterprise as the institutionalization of a new typology that is distinguished by specific features from its inception. By relying on a theoretical analysis, the article supports the interpretation of social enterprise as an innovative institutional tool that can have a role in supporting growth and welfare. The essential features of social enterprise, which justify their competitiveness vis-à-vis public and for-profit organizations in the production and delivery of general-interest services, are thoroughly investigated. The article sheds light on the contribution of social enterprises to reforming and democratizing the traditional European welfare systems, which – since the 1980s – have revealed their inability to distribute welfare services inclusively and cope with the growing phenomena of poverty and inequalities.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the evolution of the social enterprise concept at an international level. It provides a comprehensive overview of the existing literature in this subject area and focuses on the legal implementation of social enterprises.

The paper is an analytic review, building on previous work. Conclusions are on how the social enterprise concept has been legally implemented in a number of representative European countries.

The lack of a common understanding of social enterprise should not be regarded as a limitation as such debate encourages a rethinking of the theoretical definition of enterprise and its legal structure. The legal recognition of social enterprise contributes to conceptual clarification in the countries concerned.

This is a conceptual discussion paper, which stimulates further research on the most interesting mechanisms and consistent models of social enterprise that are developing at an international level.

The paper synthesises existing conceptual studies on social enterprise. It contributes to enrich the current debate on social enterprise and aids in focusing future research.

Within the accounting discipline and its literature, attention to the role of social and non-profit organizations has been growing, particularly with respect to issues of accountability and social accounting. In response, the aim of this introductory article is to present the background for the book by highlighting (i) the relevance and rise of the non-profit sector worldwide, (ii) the limitations of the conventional accounting framework when applied/transposed to NPOs and (iii) the ‘social accounting project’ for NPOs. The article presents analysis and critique based on a literature review of the accountability framework for NPOs. After presenting key worldwide statistics regarding the growing non-profit sector, the article points out the skepticism regarding the adoption of traditional accounting principles and frameworks for NPOs. The article offers both an examination of how to improve the accounting system for NPOs and a discussion of the benefits emerging from the social and environmental accounting and reporting models. ‘The social accounting project’ for NPOs is presented as a pathway towards these innovative practices increasing organizational transparency. This article and the book overall provide new contributions to the research literature, fostering synergies among financial accounting and social accounting scholars engaging with the NPO subject area. Moreover it brings together studies from a range of disciplines, such as financial accounting, social accounting, economics, management, and third-sector studies. This cross-disciplinary approach offers a major contribution to our developing knowledge in this field.

There is still no universal definition of the third sector in Europe, but it can be seen as including all types of non-governmental not-for-profit entities such as non-profit organizations, mutuals, cooperatives, social enterprises and foundations. This article attempts to make sense of the current shifting conceptualization of the third sector in Europe. It is based on short country summaries of the images and concepts of the third sector in 13 European countries by EMES Network’s members, first presented in 2008 (Defourny and Pestoff, 2008; nine of them were recently revised and are found in the appendix to this article.). The perception and development of the third sector in Europe is closely related to the other major social governance institutions/mechanisms, like the market, state and community and through the third sector’s interaction with them. Moreover, many third sector organizations (TSOs) overlap with these other social institutions, resulting in varying degrees of hybridity and internal tensions experienced by them. TSOs can generate resources from their activities on the market, by providing services in partnership with the state and/or by promoting the interests of a given community or group. The country overviews document a growing professionalization of TSOs in most countries and a growing dependency of public funds to provide services. This has important theoretical and practical implications for orienting the articles included in this book. Thus, it can provide a key for better understanding the discussion and analysis in the remainder of this volume.

This study aims to examine the relationships between the rules that a cooperative membership decides upon and members' motives for action. It considers individual self-interest in relation with motives that are consistent with the values of cooperation.

This paper comprises two parts. The first is theoretical and discusses cooperative governance's features in the context of individual motives. The second part is empirical and based on survey data from Italian multistakeholder, worker-run social cooperatives. It uses cross-sectional data gathered from 4,134 workers and 310 managers in 310 cooperatives in Italy to provide evidence of rules and individual motives. Regression analysis confirms the existence of a linkage between individual self-interest and motives.

Rules mainly, but not exclusively, play an enabling function, which implies responding to both nonmonetary and monetary individual motives. With greater articulation within institutions – through the definition of multiple rights for accessing decision-making – the authors expect increases in individual capabilities to match motives with specific organizational rules in pursuit of consistent ends. This is confirmed by the association that the authors found between individual motives and commitment.

The authors’ illustration is limited to one specific type of cooperative, the social cooperative, in which prosocial motives are expected to be stronger than in other cooperative forms, although one could say that all cooperative models emphasize procommunity and prosocial aims. Data are cross-sectional and do not allow for the identification of causality, only of statistical relations' strength.

The continuous scrutiny and adaptation of motives and means imply that cooperators communicate and engage in a learning process.

While the institutional spheres that support investor-owned organizations and self-interested profit-maximizing behavior have been analyzed, a framework that accommodates personal control rights and a richer view of individual motives is lacking. The value added from the paper is to suggest one.

To explore the meaning of sustainability from the perspective of community‐based social entrepreneurs (CBSE) on an estate in East London, UK, and enable local practitioners to express their views, and where appropriate, to challenge the values, cultural norms and underlying assumptions involved.

The study focused on an area of London that has been trapped in a spiral of decline for several decades and has been targeted for regeneration and renewal by the UK government. Describes the application collaborative inquiry and storytelling as research approaches to gather data from four social enterprise practitioners, where the techniques were chosen to be qualitative and allow the voices of informants to be heard, and their meanings and interpretations to be articulated. Addressed the following issues: what social entrepreneurs mean when they talk about sustainability( whether these meanings differ from the dominant discourse of sustainability contained in social enterprise policy and strategy publications; how sustainability is achieved by CBSE; what the barriers to achieving sustainability are; and whether sustainability is constrained by environmental context.

The findings indicated that the social enterprise meta‐narrative has followed orthodox business and embraced the values and ethos of the corporate sector (competitiveness, profit maximisation), while social enterprise is seen as an organizational hybrid with social and business goals. Concludes that the small number of social enterprises that have achieved financial sustainability from trading are included in the dominant discourse, but the majority of social enterprises, especially those engaged in community development and those located in areas of disadvantage, are not, and are unlikely ever to be, financially sustainable.

Provides a realistic assessment of the sustainability of social enterprises in areas of social and economic deprivation.

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 countries

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 benefit the community. They rely on a collective dynamics involving various types of stakeholders in their governing bodies, they place a high value on their autonomy and they bear economic risks linked to their activity”.

It was found that although the concept of social enterprise itself has not gained the same recognition in all EU countries (and is even still poorly understood in several of them), the reality is that growth and social enterprise are being experienced in most EU countries.

If the concept of social enterprise is on the public agenda of several EU countries, the understanding as well as the institutions to support their development vary from one country to the other. This paper provides a comparative analysis of this heterogeneous but rich landscape.

In 2022, the EMES Network celebrated its 20th anniversary. The purpose of this paper is to trace the intellectual path of social enterprise (SE) research that has unfolded through some of the major EMES research projects.

This journey is recounted through three major milestones: the emergence and development of the EMES approach; the identification of various SE schools of thought; the International Comparative Social Enterprise Models (ICSEM) Project.

The first section digs into the roots of the EMES approach – an ideal-type which allowed researchers to explore an SE field that was then largely unknown. In a second stage, a reading grid was developed to identify the different SE conceptions, their convergences and their divergences. In a third step, the ICSEM Project, acknowledging the impossibility to provide a single, universal definition of SE, aimed to identify SE models across the world. Defourny and Nyssens developed an SE typology and made the hypothesis that it was neither country-specific nor even context-specific. Based on the EMES ideal-type (which constituted a particularly relevant tool to inform the diversity of SE models), data were collected on over 700 SEs worldwide; three major SE models were found in almost all the countries covered.

This contribution does not aim to summarise all the – numerous and fruitful – research projects carried out by EMES members, but to show the common thread that runs through several of them.