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This paper aims to explain the development of the social economy by analyzing when, why and how the community interest company (CIC) legal structure was established in the UK. The CIC legal structure was designed for social enterprise to ensure that company assets are committed to public benefit in perpetuity.

This research paper uses archival data and semistructured interviews to analyze the historical development of the social economy, emergence of social enterprise and the establishment of the CIC legal structure.

The historical analysis describes why and how the idea for the CIC emerged from practitioners and explains how collaboration between practitioners, lawyers, civil servants and politicians established the CIC as a new legal structure for social enterprise.

The analysis explains how practitioners influenced policy development and demonstrates how practitioner influence can be usefully incorporated into policy development.

The CIC legal structure advanced the social economy by creating an institutionally recognized brand identity for social enterprise that locks assets to public benefit in perpetuity.

The paper presents a detailed empirical account of the establishment of a new legal structure for social enterprise and applies theoretical concepts to develop an integrated account of social economy advancement.

To study the legal underpinnings of the definition of social enterprise in the context of the problems with the corporate legal structures available in the UK in the late twentieth century and the reforms of the early twenty first century to assess whether further reforms are needed to facilitate the growth of the social enterprise movement.

A definition of social enterprise is proposed and examined in light of the problems associated with twentieth century company law and the efforts to reform and develop it in the period, 2000‐2006.

Three major developments may be seen to have important consequences for the continuing reform and development of company law: the Industrial and Provident Societies Act 2002 (Office of Public Sector Information 2002a) (private members bill); the Co‐operatives and Community Benefit Societies Act 2003 (Office of Public Sector Information 2003) (private members bill); the PIU Report “Private Action, Public Benefit” (Cabinet Office/Strategy Unit 2002) and the resulting Companies (Audit, Investigations and Community Business) Act 2004 (Office of Public Sector Information 2004); and the Charities Act 2006 (Office of Public Sector Information 2006). Refers also to other developments impacting on company law, notably the European Co‐operative Society’s European Co‐operative Society Statute (SCE) Regulation and Directive.

Provides a useful guide to UK legal trends likely to impact on social enterprises.

Purpose – The aim of this chapter is to analyse the discourse associated with, and preceding the establishment of, the community interest company (CIC) legal format in the United Kingdom in 2005. The analysis identifies the political, ideological, social and economic meta-narratives that are embedded in five key texts from which the CIC emerges and is codified.

Design, methodology and approach – The approach consists of a discourse analysis of five principal texts produced between 2002 and 2005 in which the idea of a CIC is articulated and refined prior to the launch of the CIC format in 2005.

Findings – Analysis of five key texts elucidates four meta-narratives that contrast political, ideological, social and economic discourse and counter-discourse.

Research implications and limitations – The selection of five key texts excludes other texts that were produced during the articulation and refinement of the CIC format. Further research to examine the diffusion, adoption and translation of the CIC legal format is recommended.

Practical implications – We show how the crafting of policy is embedded in meta-narratives that shape the content and implementation of policy.

Social implications – The CIC protects, in perpetuity, collectively held property rights through an asset lock, and enables capital to be raised from investors and trustees to be paid. These characteristics are beneficial in that community asset ownership can contribute to local development, e.g. by creating new ventures, generating jobs and anchoring wealth in communities; raising capital from investors can facilitate the enterprise to grow and scale up; and the expertise of the board can be enhanced by rewarding trustees financially for their involvement in the governance of the CIC.

Originality – This chapter presents the first critical analysis of the discourse associated with the origins of the idea for, and articulation of, the need for a legal format for social enterprises in the United Kingdom.

To ensure that students are well prepared to successfully analyze this case, they should be familiar with the following concepts, theories and principles:

▪ Stakeholder theory

▪ Concept of duty to consult and accommodate

▪ Concept of social license to operate (SLO)

▪ Concept of indigenous economic self-determination

▪ Indigenous world view

▪ Seventh generation principle

▪ Cree principles

▪ Dene principles

The information provided in this case was gathered by the authors through face-to-face interviews, phone interviews, e-mail exchanges and secondary research. Meadow Lake Tribal Council (MLTC) separates business operations from council operations through use of corporate entities (as shown in Exhibit 1 of the case). Meadow Lake Tribal Council II (MLTCII) is the corporate entity that oversees two companies referenced in the case: Mistik Management and NorSask Forest Products LP. Interviews were conducted with the General Manager at Mistik Management, Certification Coordinator at Mistik Management, Chief of Buffalo River Dene Nation, Chief of Waterhen Lake First Nation, MLTC Vice-Chief, Board Member and Advisor to MLTCII, President and CEO of MLTCII, MLTCII Business Development Consultant and a former consultant with MLTC, NorSask Forest Products and Mistik Management.

Mistik Management Ltd., a forestry management company co-owned by the nine First Nations of MLTC, was a leader in economic reconciliation in 2022. However, the company had dealt with significant challenges not long after it was established in 1989. Richard Gladue, former Chief of the one of MLTCs Member First Nations and a leader in economic development at MLTC, had been actively involved in establishing the organization. Gladue loved the life and vitality of the boreal forest in the Meadow Lake region and felt a sense of responsibility to take care of the forest and the land for generations to come. This responsibility was balanced with the acknowledgement that the forest also provided vast economic development, employment and wealth generation opportunities for MLTC and its Member First Nations.

In the early 1990s, MLTC and Mistik Management dealt with a year-long blockade by a group of protesters that included members of Canoe Lake Cree First Nation, one of the Member First Nations of MLTC. They had not been consulted on Mistik’s processes and policies, and the company’s clear-cut logging had affected their ability to continue their traditional way of life and practices on the land. After the incident, Mistik Management moved more quickly to invest in a co-management process that they were still refining and using in 2022 when consulting with Indigenous groups and communities.

A natural resource economy brings together Indigenous peoples, industry and government. In this case, students will learn about the important role that relationships play and how decisions are made when balancing complex legal, environmental and economic interests. Students will learn about the history of duty to consult and accommodate in Canada; conduct a stakeholder analysis and reflect on how decisions affect stakeholder interests; and make recommendations for meaningful Indigenous engagement strategies using the concept of social license and indigenous principles.

This case is suitable for use in undergraduate courses on indigenous business, ethical decision-making, public policy and/or natural resource development. There may also be applications in other fields of study, including anthropology, economics and political science.

If the case is used in an indigenous business course, it would be best positioned in the last third of the class, after topics such as duty to consult and accommodate, social license and meaningful engagement with indigenous communities have been covered. If used in an ethical decision-making course, it would be best used when discussing stakeholder theory and engaging in stakeholder analysis. If used in a public policy course, the case could be used to start a discussion around the duty to consult and accommodate indigenous communities in Canada. If used in a natural resource development course, the case would be best used as an example of indigenous economic development.

To apply a consumer‐based approach to the study of the underlying concepts involved in social enterprises.

The report aimed to examine social enterprises from the consumer’s point of view and address the question of how social enterprise can make its case for consumer support. Pays particular attention to market segmentation, including: the ethical marketplace; under‐served markets; companies; public sector; voluntary sector; and consumer agents.

It is suggested that there are three schools of thought on how social enterprises should be promoted: the first focusing on social enterprises as “ethical businesses”, with the term used as an umbrella term for a wide range of firms practising corporate social responsibility (CSR); the second emphasising the role of social enterprise in trading for a social purpose; and the third focusing on social ownership.

Future research may be directed towards further investigating the market analysis and testing of the concept, identifying the core brand and value proposition of a label, and identifying business plan models for viable growth, including its impact on social enterprise development and growth.

Provides a valuable contribution to the social enterprise literature which tends not to take a consumerist viewpoint.

In recent years, Australian minerals companies have increasingly considered Aboriginal communities to be “stakeholders”, suggesting that new practices of respect have superseded past colonial practices of dispossession, and apparently challenging neoliberal ideology. The increasing pervasiveness of the term “community engagement” exemplifies this apparent transformation. However, in common with the similar interdiscursive notions, “sustainable development” and “corporate social responsibility” (CSR), the meaning of “community engagement” may be contestable. In this case study of a minerals‐processing site in eastern Australia, discourses of “community engagement” among company staff and local indigenous community members are critically compared. The overall aim is to illuminate discursive tensions and multiple subjectivities among participants' assumptions and worldviews.

Broadly speaking, the paper uses a discourse analytic approach to demonstrate how apparently rational processes are contestable, unstable and discursively constructed. Using transcripts of interviews with 12 indigenous community members, and five company staff, the study firstly describes participants' conceptual relationships and identifies the discursive formations from which participants draw. Using closer textual analysis, it then investigates how participants' meanings and worldviews are constituted through discursively produced texts.

The paper finds that both company and community participants interdiscursively draw on competing discourses, but sometimes they do so in different ways. Most notably, company participants implicitly see indigeneity as static, non‐negotiable and non‐problematic, while community participants view indigeneity as inextricably bound up in identity, land and respect. Furthermore, participants have competing understandings of notions such as development, industry and money.

Concepts such as “sustainable development”, “CSR” and now “community engagement” are often cited as evidence that corporations are responding adequately to criticisms regarding their historical misdemeanours. The implicit assumption is that the contemporary capitalism can satisfactorily address social concerns. Yet, this study suggests that it does so by internalising antithetical discourses, thereby neutralising opposition, and maintaining both capitalism's legitimacy and colonialism's power relations. Thus, the capacity to challenge assumptions underlying the colonial‐capitalist project may be constrained by historical relations of power.

To fulfill their economic and social missions, it is imperative yet challenging for hybrid ventures to demonstrate legitimacy (fitting in) while simultaneously projecting distinctiveness (standing out). One important means for doing so is by adopting and promoting the recent B Corporation certification. Drawing on a comprehensive analysis of the emergence of this certification, we argue that when it comes to promoting their businesses, hybrid ventures should not adopt a one size fits all approach. Rather, their promotion strategies need to be adapted to their specific contexts. We theorize and develop a typology of certification promotion strategies for hybrid ventures based on the relative prevalence of other hybrid ventures in the same regions and industries. We conclude by articulating why the B Corporation movement is a rich and underexplored context for scholarship on hybrid ventures, and highlight several promising future research directions.

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 investigates how the creation of social value occurs in different organisational fields, and how it is implemented by organisations that are typically associated with member welfare and social objectives. The purpose of this study, specifically, is to analyse how social responsibility is implemented in organisational forms that do not pursue profit-making objectives in an exclusive or dominant way, that is, organisations that explicitly shape their aims and governance around the production of social value.

The paper discusses the main types of organisational forms and their relation with social responsibility. It then presents four case studies completed between 2011 and 2013 in Scotland, UK. These include a range of types of non-investor-owned organisations: two employee-owned companies, one co-operative enterprise and one social enterprise. The case studies have explanatory and descriptive nature, and were aimed at enquiring how non-conventional organisations design their governance, achieve economic sustainability and show capacity to produce social value.

Findings highlight the most common elements of the modality by which social responsibility is instituted in the non-profit sector. These include: modifying control rights (“who takes part” and “according to what criteria”); including stakeholders in decision-making processes eventually by means of external networking (how decisions are made and what resources are shared); and making societal aims explicit (“to what expected effects”). Results also emphasise that the production of social value presents challenges.

Results indicate that social responsibility can be created in different ways. This study’s analysis, however, is limited to illustrative cases from the specific context of Scotland. First, further research is needed on solutions that contribute to a practical understanding on how social value is produced in a variety of contexts. Second, this research does not address what competences are required to develop such solutions. Finally, in this study, the focus has been mostly on successful cases. More insights on the difficulties and limitations that non-investor-owned organisations face when implementing social responsibility would be needed.

The implementation of this study’s findings is within the control of practitioners and can be useful to the sector, as it identifies the features and challenges of governance consistent with deep forms of social responsibility.

The paper identifies forms of organisations that place the creation of social value at their core. In doing so, this study’s contribution improves understanding around forms of enterprise that can generate positive impacts for society, so that society can promote them actively.

This study’s contribution offers unique case studies using a framework that analyses social responsibility in a novel way that is by explaining how non-conventional firms design their governance consistently with the aim of producing value for society and to what extent this is done by including diverse interests coming from a variety of stakeholders.

This paper aims to investigate the potential of the “image-idea” of a “circular economy” for re-thinking property in law: In particular, to develop a strategy for making visible “alternative property practices” of community ownership across the subject areas of business and property law, to enhance the visibility of models of community ownership and interrogate their potential.

Case study research was undertaken into three public houses to investigate the ways in which the orthodoxies of property and ownership in the academy are challenged by evidence of “alternative property practices” in the community.

Using this approach renders visible tensions between the logics of economic value and social asset, carried in processes of abstraction and materiality, and mediated within the field of property by the development of techniques for holding property as title and benefit. It reveals the ways in which “property” as idea, practice and technique is used by people seeking to disrupt or defend against the economic logic of profit and investment. It raises questions concerning how property and law is imaged in the academy and it introduces one way of using an image-idea to open new perspectives and potential.

These implications emerge: the partiality of orthodox accounts of property; the importance of thinking property in terms of life-cycle and logics ecologies, field and techniques; how an model-theory derived from one discipline can be repurposed, in a second life, in an other discipline as an “image-idea” to refresh the host discipline; the significance of investigating “community assets” within and for property law and the need for more research into “alternative property practices” and the importance of case studies.

An enhanced knowledge of the development and potential of “community assets” within the academy, and of the potential to promote and support “alternative property practices” with the requisite legal skills and techniques – alongside a consideration of the limits of formal law in terms of policy expectations.

The research is of value to community activists in thinking how law can be used to support community development in terms of holding community assets; and the limitations of formal law which then requires an embedded approach considering how the development of practices and narratives can support community initiatives in relation to property held for community benefit.

There has been very little coverage of “community assets” within legal research, especially moving across business and property as subject areas, and no coverage on public houses taken into community ownership. This paper combines an introduction to the relevant legal forms with a consideration of the use of them in practice: considering, in particular, how practices and narratives deployed by and within the community think and present “property” as a means by which to counter the economic logic of profit. All this is made possible through the use of case-studies made visible by the utilization of the image-idea of the circular economy – used here not as a model-theory, but rather as an aid to opening thinking into new territories accessed through new perspectives.