Social innovation, social economy and social enterprise: what can the European debate tell us?

Abstract

1990s when the term began to be increasingly used in both Western europe and the United States. Indeed, the third sector, be it called the non- profit sector, the voluntary sector or the social economy, has long witnessed entrepreneurial dynamics which resulted in innovative solutions for providing services or goods to persons or communities whose needs were neither met by private companies nor by public providers. however, for reasons which vary from region to region, the concept of social enterprise is now gaining a fast growing interest along with two closely related terms, namely ‘social entrepreneur’ and ‘social entrepreneurship’. Social innovation, or at least innovation to provide answers to social needs, seems to be at the heart of the fast developing literature around those ‘Se concepts’. So it makes sense to question more deeply the actual links which may exist between the corpus of social enterprise research and the social innovation dynamics as defined in this book’s introduction through three major features: the satisfaction of human needs, the relations between humans in general and between social groups in particular, and the empowerment of people trying to fulfil their needs, this third feature being seen as a bridge between the first and the second. For doing so, we first contextualize the emerging Se concepts, especially highlighting their different roots and subsequent schools of thought both in the United States and europe. While doing this, we try to show the extent to which social innovation has a place and a role in such streams of literature (Section 3.2). Then, we analyse more deeply the eMeS conceptualization of social enterprise. The eMeS approach to social enterprise has been developed by a group of european scholars and is anchored in the european tradition of social economy (Section 3.3). The specificity of the eMeS approach is to approach social enterprises dynamics both by its aim, the primacy of social aim and its process through democratic governance echoing the different dimensions of social innovation (Section 3.4). Finally, we develop the issue of the links between public policies and the diffusion of social innovation in the field of social enterprise. For that purpose, we rely on one of the main eMeS research projects in the field of work integration social enterprise (Section 3.5).