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This paper aims to examine student exercise physiologists (EPs) and student dietitians’ confidence regarding working with people with severe mental illness (SMI) pre- and post-practicum in a mental health service.

This single-arm, quality improvement project included students completing practicum within a lifestyle programme embedded in mental health services. Student EPs completed 100 h of practicum across 15 weeks as part requirement for their Bachelor of Exercise Physiology degree and student dietitians completed six weeks full-time (40 h/week) for the part requirement of their Master of Nutrition and Dietetics. Students completed the Dietetic Confidence Scale (terminology was adapted for student EPs) pre- and post-practicum.

In total, 27 student EPs and 13 student dietitians completed placement and returned pre- and post-practicum questionnaires. Pre-practicum confidence scores were 90.8 ± 17.1 and 86.9 ± 18.9 out of a possible 140 points for student EPs and student dietitians, respectively. Confidence scores increased substantially post-practicum for both student EPs [mean difference (MD) = 29.3 ± 18.8, p < 0.001, d = 1.56] and dietitian students (MD = 26.1 ± 15.9, p = 0.002, d = 1.64). There were significant improvements in confidence across all domains of the confidence questionnaire for both EPs and dietitian students.

There is a research gap in understanding the confidence levels of student EPs’ and student dietitians’ when working with people with mental illness and the impact that undertaking a practicum in a mental health setting may play. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore student EP and student dietitian confidence in working with people with SMI pre- and post-practicum in a mental health setting.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a nuanced understanding of the diverse practices social enterprises engage in to fulfil their commitments of delivering social/environmental goods and/or services while earning income to sustain their activities.

This research paper is based on an empirical investigation which used an ethnographic approach to study the social economy in two distinct city regions in the north of England.

Against a common-sense view of social enterprises being able to balance (with ease) social and economic goals, this paper suggests, based on empirical insights, that such a harmonious rendition tends to neglect the messiness at the heart of such organisations. Heeding ongoing reflections, explanations and negotiations as key ingredients in keeping social enterprises “balanced”, this paper argues that negotiating tensions is a constantly dynamic process.

Using an ethnographic approach, this paper offers insights into the complexities and tensions social enterprises constantly deal with and it shows these tensions must be constantly renegotiated.

This paper aims to explore how nascent social businesses move beyond the incubation phase and it develops understanding of how early-stage social businesses access finance to achieve growth.

This exploratory and inductive study is based on four focus group discussions with early-stage social entrepreneurs, “successful” social entrepreneurs who had achieved growth, and social impact investors.

Social capital allows a social business founder to access financial capital to “prove their concept”, or to directly attract investment from family and friends for start-up costs. To gain funding, social entrepreneurs present the desired image of the heroic change-maker. Interestingly, creating the right impression is equally important in securing financial capital as the “hard-work” itself.

This study was conducted in London, which, like many other “global” cities, has a unique business environment. The study is exploratory in nature. Further work in this area is required to draw more definitive conclusions.

Financial products offered to social businesses are often dispersed and inappropriate. The study indicates that access to “soft loans” and grants is critical in the early stages of social business growth and that social entrepreneurs use both formal and informal funding sources to develop their businesses. Where a person is not connected to wealthy acquaintances either through family, or through social networks, they may often struggle to access finance in a world where the network’s resources appear to be as important as the entrepreneur’s resourcefulness. This has particular implications for the demographic make-up of “successful social entrepreneurs” operating social businesses, as these may be drawn from the most privileged and/or well-connected members of a group which already appears skewed towards white middle-class males.

This study highlights that current support structures favour relatively privileged social entrepreneurs rather than encompassing and empowering those disadvantaged, social minority groups and those in the greatest need. This is important because social business is often portrayed, possibly incorrectly, as a mechanism for addressing poverty through empowerment of disadvantaged groups.

Research in social business development has largely neglected the social and cultural dynamics that embed start-ups. This paper tackles this gap and contributes to building knowledge in the area of early-stage social business development.

The purpose of this paper is to examine social enterprise sustainability by comparing recent international research with prior findings seeking to identify the important factors that facilitate social enterprise development.

The research used a concurrent, convergent mixed methods approach on a sample of 93 social enterprise leaders using surveys and face-to-face interviews. The participants were sourced from a cross-section of social enterprise organisational types from urban and regional locations in Australia and Scotland.

The findings support prior research, identifying resourcing, organisational capabilities, collaborative networks and legitimacy as influential in the success of social enterprises. However, the research contributes new knowledge by revealing an overarching growth orientation as the dominant factor in the strategic management for sustainability of these ventures. This growth orientation is generally associated with the intent to achieve profitability. Thus, social enterprise managers view a commercially focused growth orientation as an overarching strategic factor that underpins organisational sustainability.

The paper delivers new insights into the strategic orientation of social ventures of benefit to policy makers and practitioners alike. The findings are significant for policy makers providing perspectives into how governmental assistance can be targeted to develop sustainable social enterprises, particularly the need to support the growth of these ventures. Similarly, practitioners are alerted to the strategic imperatives of incorporating a commercially focused growth orientation and the latent potential that exists in the networks of social enterprise.

Widespread effects are reported on UK economic productivity through poorly managed depressive illness in the workplace. Starting in 1999, the authors have investigated the onset, treatment and recovery from depression as experienced personally by members of the caring professions, using first‐hand accounts to generate a composite picture of ‘what works for me’ in managing depression, and in particular ‘what works’ in maintaining or returning to employment in health and social care. This paper reports findings from a survey of 500 social workers. Negative perceptions of previous help from professional sources (such as general practitioner, psychiatrist or psychotherapist) were related specifically to three persisting, negative effects at work: lack of concentration, low confidence, and irritability (with tiredness). These occupational effects were strongly associated with each other. In relation to occupational health, inadequate treatment of depression may allow these negative effects on performance to persist. The findings are discussed in relation to conceptual frameworks about well‐being taken from ‘positive psychology’ that suggest future approaches to both prevention and rehabilitation of these occupational problems.

There is much current policy and practitioner enthusiasm for using social enterprise to tackle the problems faced by homeless people. However, there is no evidence base to support (or negate) this policy focus. The purpose of this paper is to identify the different ways in which social enterprise responds to the needs of homeless people, and some of the challenges faced by social enterprises in the homelessness field.

Desk‐based research of the grey literature identified different models of social enterprise in the homelessness field. A review of the two sets of literature on homelessness and social enterprise was conducted to identify the implications of these models for homeless people.

Six models of social enterprise in the homelessness field are identified. Social enterprise involves balancing social and economic objectives. As third sector organisations become more business focused, there is a risk that those homeless people with the most complex or acute needs are abandoned as they are not profitable to work with.

This paper is the first to bring together two sets of literature in order to identify how social enterprise responds to homelessness. The paper is of use to policy makers aiming to develop targeted approaches to tackling homelessness. It is also of use to organisations in the homelessness field looking to develop social enterprise models.

This paper aims to explore the role of marketing as a route to sustainability for social enterprises providing public services. It examines the tensions between the economic and social objectives, both of social enterprises and of marketing. It concludes by offering a new model of the role of marketing for sustainable social enterprises.

This paper used the case study approach which included four cases. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the chief executives of each social enterprise. The cases were classified by age.

The paper demonstrates that while marketing potentially has much to offer in terms of organisational resilience for social enterprises, its application is currently undermined by its misunderstanding in practise within a “product-dominant” business logic. Despite this, the study finds a strong element of the unconscious application of marketing by social enterprises.

The implications of this are discussed in the context of the “public service-dominant” business logic that is currently emerging in public management, and recommendations are made for policy and practice as to how to enhance the contribution of marketing, both to sustainable social enterprises and to public services delivery.

This study aims to assess the alignment of South Korea’s government-certified social enterprises (GCSEs) with prevailing social enterprise (SE) models, notably the entrepreneurial nonprofit, social cooperative and social business models delineated in the “Emergence of Social Enterprises in Europe” (Defourny and Nyssens, 2012, 2017a, 2017b) and the “principle of interest” frameworks (Defourny et al., 2021). Thereby, it seeks to situate these enterprises within recognized frameworks and elucidate their hybrid identities.

Analyzing panel data from 2016 to 2020 for 259 GCSEs, this study uses tslearn for k-means clustering with dynamic time warping to assess their developmental trajectories and alignment with established SE models, which echoes the approach of Defourny et al. (2021). We probe the “fluid” identities of semi-public sector SEs, integrating Gordon’s (2013) notion that they tend to blend various SE traditions as opposed to existing in isolation.

Results indicate that GCSEs do align with prevalent SE frameworks. Furthermore, they represent a spectrum of SE models, suggesting the versatility of the public sector in fostering diverse types of SEs.

The concept of a semi-public sector SE model has been relatively uncharted, even though it holds significance for research on SE typologies and public sector entrepreneurship literature. This study bridges this gap by presenting empirical evidence of semi-public SEs and delineating the potential paths these enterprises might take as they amalgamate various SE traditions.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that neoinstitutional theory can provide insights into the conflicts between social ends and economic means within social enterprises (SEs). Tensions between these differing institutional logics may be seen as a manifestation of ambiguity and incoherence in an organizational field that is, despite many recent regulative and normative changes, still weakly institutionalized in the UK.

The research design adopts a qualitative approach and is based on semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 40 SE managers in four major UK cities.

Findings suggest that SE managers deal with the competing institutional logics of “the market” and “social care” in differing ways.

The case studies are derived from major UK cities where SEs are more likely to be dependent on state and quasi-public sector forms of support.

Policies attempting to imbue a more commercial and business-like approach with the institutional field of SE should recognize the tensions imposed by such a shift. These tensions are especially pronounced in SEs affected by changes to state funding regimes and publicly sponsored markets. In some situations, such market logic may be largely inappropriate.

Changing institutional logics within an organizational field such as SE requires a recognition of the complex interrelationships between that factors that create and sustain such a field, most notably legal (regulative), educational (normative) and attitudinal (cognitive) factors.

This is one of the few papers to explore the value of neoinstitutional theory in the context of SE.