Abstract
Social enterprises are organizations that operate in the marketplace as a business, but pursue social, cultural, environmental or societal goals. Since the concept of ‘social enterprise’ first emerged 30 years ago (DeFourny & Nyssens 2010), the term has come to be applied to a group of widely hetero0genous organizations. However, they all sit at the junction of the nonprofit and for-profit sectors. Some of the types of organizations now called social enterprises existed well before the term ‘social enterprise’ was conceived – Canada’s Canadian Goodwill Industries, for example. Increasingly, however, the group of new and old organizations that blend business with social goals is being seen as a distinct new “identifiable and viable organizational form” (Elson & Hall 2010). Keywords: CVSS, Centre for Voluntary Sector Studies, Working Paper Series,TRSM, Ted Rogers School of Management Citation:
Highlights
Canadian social enterprises are able to operate under a range of legal forms in Canada, but these forms do not fit well with the basic structure of social enterprise, even if they work well for some/many individual social enterprises
The legal forms that place no formal restriction on income generation make it more difficult to pursue social ends, while the legal forms designed for organizations with social ends provide only limited opportunities for earning business income and raising external financing
Prior to the introduction of the Community Interest Companies (CICs), UK social enterprises were in the same position as Canadian social enterprises in using a variety of legal options designed for other types of organizations
Summary
Social enterprises are organizations that operate in the marketplace as a business, but pursue social, cultural, environmental or societal goals. Since the concept of ‘social enterprise’ first emerged 30 years ago (DeFourny & Nyssens 2010), the term has come to be applied to a group of widely hetero0genous organizations. They all sit at the junction of the nonprofit and for-profit sectors. This report aims to increase our understanding of how Canada’s evolving legal framework for social enterprises is affecting, and is likely to affect, the future development of social enterprise in Canada. Its main focus is the new legal forms, designed for social enterprise, that have been recently introduced in Canada
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