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This paper aims to investigate the intersection between corporate governance and management accounting information within the board meeting of an English further education college.

The empirical fieldwork uses an interventionist approach. Board members’ mental models of a management accounting boundary object are analysed.

The paper supports Parker (2007) and Cornforth and Edward’s (1999) observation that within a board meeting, collaborative “micro-management” type talk is considered to lie outside the acceptable remit of non-executive and executive board member interaction. Such an attitude can prevent an intertwining of management accounting information and other mental models of an organisation occurring. This can preclude management accounting information from rendering an organisation visible, in an expansive manner, within a boardroom.

Interventionist researchers working within the black box of the board are encouraged to design more radical and collaborative interventions than the interview/report format used here.

Non-executive directors might benefit from being offered the opportunity to interact with management accounting information outside the formal board meeting and committee structure.

A deeper understanding of how directors’ mental models, boardroom behaviours and attitudes influence their interaction with management accounting information is offered. Insight into the limitations of using management accounting information in the boardroom is developed.

This paper aims to re-evaluate social enterprise (SE) history to pinpoint a pluralist turn in communitarian philosophy during the 1970s, which has the potential to transform labour and consumer rights in enterprise development.

Through a close examination of model rules created by founders of the FairShares Association (FSA), the authors find that the communitarian origins of SE are disturbingly obscured and hidden.

In studying FSA documents and building a timeline of the development of the FairShares Model (FSM), the authors found links between SE developments in the UK, continental Europe, Asia, North/South America and the development of solidarity cooperatives.

The authors argue that the discovery of a communitarian pluralist turn advances “new cooperativism” by enfranchising both labour and users in industrial relations (IR). Using this insight, they challenge accounts of SE history and argue for more research on SE’s potential contribution to radical IR.

The paper highlights the potential of the FSM as a vehicle for catalysing new SE and IR practices that share wealth and power more equitably between social entrepreneurs, workforce members, service/product users and community/social investors.

In light of the faster than expected take up of the community interest company (CIC) in the UK, the purpose of this paper is to revisit findings from a study undertaken in 2000 on the impact of asset‐locks on the longevity, growth and management styles in co‐operative social enterprises.

This paper is both conceptual and empirical. It examines different worker co‐operative traditions and develops a meta‐theory that explains underlying assumptions in different forms of co‐operative social enterprise. Using empirical data from five common ownership co‐operatives and five equity‐based co‐operatives, this exploratory study finds differences in management style, access to finance and growth prospects both within and between the two groups.

Devolution of management responsibilities is more prevalent in co‐operatives permitting both individual and collective ownership, as opposed to common ownership. Access to external finance is less problematic for organisations where individuals have made investments. Despite this, it is not established that organisations with external equity or loan finance grow quicker or fare better over the longer term.

The value of the paper lies both in the development of a meta‐theoretical framework for differentiating forms of worker co‐operative, as well as empirical evidence on the impact of asset‐locks in the management and development of social enterprises. The study suggests that the companies limited by share (CLS) version of the CIC, or abandonment of the CIC in favour of an appropriately structured CLS or Industrial and Provident Society model, may be appropriate for social enterprises wishing to grow, but makes little difference in small service oriented social enterprises.

For the past decade, sub-post offices (POs) in the UK have been subject to intensive pressures to marketise their business. Actual or threatened closures have led charities to become involved in projects to preserve community post offices. This paper aims to investigate the attitudes of the trustees and staff involved in six charity-backed POs to answer the research question “Do those involved with charity-backed POs prioritise profit generation or community resourcing?”

This research adopted a neo-empiricist stance on the collection and interpretation of data. The authors treated “attitudes” as real phenomena that are subjectively experienced and concretely expressed through activities in an objectively real world. Data were gathered from four or more people in each of six POs by sampling their services and conducting face-to-face interviews. The emphasis was on achieving verstehen – a rich understanding of a specific approach to social enterprise grounded in interpretations of human activity under conditions of naturalistic inquiry.

The authors found that charity-backed POs were focussed on preserving POs as a community resource but articulated this by framing profitability in three distinct ways: as a PO generating a surplus that can be gifted or reallocated to a (parent) charity’s other activities; as an activity that offsets a charity’s fixed costs; or enables or promotes its public benefit aims.

There are few peer-reviewed studies of the potential of sub-POs as sites for social enterprise, and none (that could be located) on the role of charities. In this study, the authors contest Liu and Ko’s view (2014, p. 402) that the key task is “to install market-oriented managerial beliefs and values into the charity retailer’s decision-making”. A counter view is offered that trading can represent a further diversification of the innovations used to support charitable endeavours.

This is the first academic study to confront the complexities of differentiating “profitability” from “profit generation” in charity-backed POs. The subtleties in the articulation of this difference by study participants helped to account for the findings of the study and to make sense of the strong consensus that POs should be seen primarily as a community resource while responding to marketisation pressures.

Prevailing concepts of corporate governance that are based on external shareholder interests have been challenged by a number of authors over the last three decades. The purpose of this paper is to outline the core assumptions of communitarian philosophy and values, together with the way writers imagine these might be enacted in a social enterprise context. These assumptions are then explored using two case studies.

The paper was conducted using participatory action research which involves parties examining current actions together and seeking to improve on them. The value of this approach is based on the plausible, authentic and critical insights it generates into management practice.

Case evidence suggests that companies are able to adopt and operate effectively while deploying communitarian values and that these values lead to alternative business objectives expressed through new forms of corporate governance. Nevertheless, the adopting of common language does not necessarily mean that social enterprises share a common philosophy.

The key contribution of this paper is to evaluate the institutionalisation of governance and consider the relationship between the form and substance of practice. By considering the link between words and actions, the paper concludes that the adoption of a governance framework, or particular language, matters less than the capacity of company members to participate in the development of governance norms that enable them to act congruently with their own beliefs and values.

The Social Enterprise Mark (SEM) is claimed to be the first award that guarantees to the public that an organisation is a social enterprise. To date, there has been limited discussion of its conceptual dimensions and legitimacy. This paper seeks to make a contribution to knowledge by critically discussing its conceptual dimensions and exploring its impact.

This exploratory study uses feedback from participants on open access co‐operative and social enterprise workshops. They were asked to study published SEM criteria then rank ideal types of social enterprise activity (a worker co‐operative, a trading charity and a self‐employed consultant) in order of likelihood of obtaining the SEM.

Workshop participants from different backgrounds drew the conclusion that SEM criteria favour trading charities and community interest companies with social and environmental objects, not enterprises that deliver social benefits through transforming labour relations and wealth sharing. Participants reacted to their own deliberations differently depending on their sectoral affiliation.

Attempts by the academic community to define the social enterprise sector have run into linguistic and practical problems. Definitions tend to privilege one group of social enterprises over another. The arrival of the SEM in the UK takes place amidst these conceptual and practical difficulties.

The SEM criteria contribute to social constructions of social enterprise that favour “social purpose” enterprises that explicitly target a beneficiary group or community, and not “socialised” enterprises that transform labour relations, promote participative democracy, and design new wealth sharing arrangements.

The paper suggests there has been a shift away from the co‐operative values advanced by the founders of the UK social enterprise movement. To secure legitimacy, the paper proposes changes to the SEM to re‐establish the conceptual alignment of social enterprise and the social economy.

This paper seeks to examine the discourses that influence policy and practice in social enterprises. In institutional circles, arguments are shaped by the desire to protect assets for the community, while entrepreneurial discourses favour a mixture of investment sources, surplus sharing and inclusive systems of governance. A critique is outlined that challenges policy‐makers and academics to move beyond the heated debate on “business‐like” activity through a deeper understanding of the social relations entered into (and created by) different social entrepreneurial activities.

The paper is wholly theoretical. First, contradictions are exposed through a review of practitioner and scholarly literature. Thereafter, empirically grounded studies are used to develop a theoretical model that accommodates and accounts for diverse practices.

A broader perspective, that views human behaviour as a product of, and support system for, our socio‐sexual choices, is deployed to extend understanding of social capital. By integrating this into governance theory, workplaces come to be seen as complex centres of community‐building, replete with economic and social goals. The concept of “social rationality” is elaborated as an alternative way to understand the legitimacy of social entrepreneurial activity and management practice.

The paper concludes by developing a framework and typology that theorises social enterprise as a heterogeneous business movement. Each form of social enterprise integrates socially rational thinking into its policies and practices. This suggests a different educational agenda for social entrepreneurs oriented towards the equitable distribution, and not accumulation, of social and economic capital.

In response to calls to critically analyse and conceptually advance social enterprise, the purpose of this paper is to examine narratives and models representing a spectrum of social enterprise from the “social” to the “economic”. The paper tests these against the experience of practitioners who were either employees in social organisations or support workers tasked with promoting social enterprise. This is timely against a background of imperatives from central governments for social organisations to compete for the delivery of public services and become more “entrepreneurial”.

The paper reports qualitative research in which participants were invited to draw lines and arrows onto spectrum models to illustrate the social and economic contexts they perceived themselves to be working within. The data comprise interviews and drawings, combined with verbal descriptions of the drawings and reflections on their significance.

The paper shows how participants interpreted the “social” and “economic” of social enterprise in pictures and words. The research suggests that social enterprise can not be told as a single narrative but as a set of little stories showing oscillations, contradictions and paradox.

Understanding of social enterprise can be much improved by giving greater recognition to ambiguities and compromises within the lived experience of contemporary practice.

The article offers new reflection on widely used images that represent social enterprise along a dichotomous, polar spectrum from social to economic.

In popular culture, ethics and morality are topical, heightened by recent attention to the banking industry and pay awards, monopoly capitalism, global warming and sustainability. Yet, surprisingly, little attention is given to these in the narrative of the conceptualisation of social enterprise or social entrepreneurship – nor in the academic research on the sector. Current conceptualisations of social enterprise fail to fully satisfy the spirit of the movement which advances a narrative that social enterprises: are more like businesses than voluntary organisations; are more entrepreneurial than public service delivery; use business models but are not just in it for the money. A focus on the economic implies a business model where deep tensions lie. A focus on social capital offers a different frame of reference, yet both these conceptualisations fail to fully identify the phenomenon that is social enterprise. The objective of this paper is to fill that gap. Ethical capital is offered here as an alternative and unrecognised conceptualisation in the field of social enterprise.

This paper is exploratory in nature – a tentative piece of theorising that brings together the authors' perspectives on ethical capital to offer a new frame of reference on social enterprise. It sets out to investigate some of the issues in order to provoke further research.

It is argued in the paper that the current ideology of the neo‐classical economic paradigm pursues interests towards the self and towards the erosion of the moral basis of association. The outcome leaves society with a problem of low ethical virtue. The implications of this paper are that social enterprises maximise ethical virtue beyond any other form of organisation and as such hold great value beyond their missions and values.

This paper starts the process of intellectual debate about the notion of ethical capital in social enterprises. The conclusions of this paper outline further research questions that need to be addressed in order to fully develop this concept.

This paper offers great value in the understanding of social enterprise through fresh insight into its conceptualisation. A critical perspective is adopted towards the current literature. This paper sheds new light on an understanding of the sector, providing practitioners, business support agencies and academics alike with a conceptualisation that has not been explored before.

The purpose of this paper is to review current conceptualisations of social enterprise and present a new theoretical model for social enterprise in the UK.

This conceptual paper draws on the rise of social enterprise in the UK context. Social enterprise in the UK emerged around the 1980s, in both political consciousness and as an academic discipline. The paper explores organisational antecedents to develop a conceptual model that prioritises different legal forms of social enterprise in the UK regulatory framework.

In critiquing policy, practitioner and academic publications, as well as the theoretical models that operationalise social enterprise, there are two observations from the literature this paper examines: first, Theories to date have tended to conceptualise social enterprise as a single hybrid form, neglecting a consideration of the various legal identities, ownership and governance types; second, Theoretical models have tended to overlook the cultural, regional and political-economic histories within their conceptualisations.

The value and originality of this paper lies in offering a new paradigm in the conceptualisation of social enterprise in the UK. This is a new contribution to knowledge that strengthens an understanding of the field. This paper creates the space to broaden and appreciate ideologically and operationally different hybrid business types of social enterprises that include charitable, solidarity and entrepreneurial type social enterprises.