Form Of Social Enterprise Research Articles

Social enterprise in South Korea

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the socio-economic background and development of social enterprises in Korea and identify representative social enterprise models.Design/methodology/approachThe typology used in this study focuses on the interaction between civil society, the state and the market in their efforts to solve social problems. As a result, the typology is mainly related with social goals, although the organizational form is also taken into consideration when selecting representative social enterprises in each type so as to present a broad array of developmental histories.FindingsThis paper identified four types of social enterprises: work integration social enterprises; social service provision social enterprises; regional regeneration social enterprises; and alter-economy social enterprises. These types are not immutable; another form of social enterprise might emerge to address a new social issue and lead to a new strand of similar social enterprises.Originality/valueThis study found that the goals of social enterprises in Korea share common characteristics with those of social enterprises in European countries. Another outstanding feature of Korean social enterprises is that most social enterprises other than work integration social enterprises also regard work integration or job creation for the disadvantaged people as one of their important social missions.

Hong Kong 2007-2017: a backlash in civil society

Ten years ago, the development of civil society in the first decade of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) was analysed in terms of three discourses: civil society as a defender of its autonomy; civil society as the third sector; and civil society as a partner in governance. The conclusion then was that Hong Kong civil society had come of age; not only had its agenda been expanded, but there was also a diversification of values. Ten years on, this article updates the state of civil society, which can be described as both turbulent and vibrant. While Hong Kong society is deeply divided as a result of several mass mobilisations and the rise of localism, there has also been a mushrooming of counter forces in the form of social enterprises and informal groups aiming to help the underprivileged. Civil society has assumed a proactive and even aggressive role in protecting its values and autonomy (the first discourse), while its partnership in governance role has been seriously damaged (the third discourse). In its role as the third sector involving social capital (the second discourse), it has continued to flourish. However, there is a growing number of groups which spread ideas of exclusion and intolerance, and engage in practices like verbal abuse and physical violence, that are opposite to the values promoted by civil society. Accordingly, Hong Kong civil society is in urgent need of repair. If the un-civil values and behaviour are not checked, civil society will experience a downward spiral.

Citizen corporation as a form of social enterprise

Programme EEA; Norway Grants via grant on Institutional cooperation project [NF-CZ07-ICP-4-338-2016]

Supported Social Enterprise

This article presents a study of supported social enterprise, a hybrid organization that not only either employs or trains members of marginalized social groups, often on disability pensions and social assistance, but also has social welfare characteristics. These organizations sell services and goods, like other forms of social enterprise, but rely heavily on external support from government programs, foundations, and a parenting nonprofit. The article presents an empirical study using a survey and interviews of participants in these organizations from Ontario, Canada, and notes that even though they earn minimally from work in these organizations, they view the experience positively. The final discussion centers on the concept of supported social enterprise and raises the question as to whether such organizations should be viewed primarily as a form of social enterprise or as a modified form of social welfare organization.

Awash in a Sea of Confusion: Benefit Corporations, Social Enterprise, and the Fear of “Greenwashing”

:In the last five years, the majority of U.S. states enacted benefit corporation legislation, creating a new legal form of business that embraces the “triple-bottom line” of people, planet, and profit. Benefit corporation status provides legal protections for directors and officers, who may now balance social and environmental impact with shareholder returns. It also creates rich opportunities for social entrepreneurs, gives investors more socially responsible options, and offers a helpful designation for consumers. I describe the history and purpose of benefit corporations, evaluate their pros and cons, and argue that safeguards against “greenwashing” make benefit corporations a valuable business form of social enterprise.

A Case for Definition: Key Features Guiding the Conception of Social Enterprise in South Africa

In recent years, there has been a meteoric rise in the number of social enterprises entering the non-profit sector landscape in South Africa. Anecdotal evidence points towards a growing realisation of the significant contribution of social enterprises to socio-economic development in the country. Despite social enterprises’ rise to prominence and importance within the non-profit sector in South Africa, there is no legal form for social enterprise and as such no clarity of the definition of social enterprise in the country. Using qualitative data from a multiple case study research project, this paper explores the various meanings of what practitioners and experts within the social enterprise space in South Africa conceive social enterprises to be. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n14p593

Cui Bono, Benefit Corporation? An Experiment Inspired by Social Enterprise Legislation in Germany and the US

How do barely incentivized norms impact incentive-rich environments? We take social enterprise legislation as a case in point. It establishes rules on behalf of constituencies that have no institutionalized means of enforcing them. By relying primarily on managers' other-regarding concerns whilst leaving corporate incentive structures unaltered, how effective can such legislation be? This question is vital for the ongoing debate about social enterprise forms, as recently introduced in several US states and in British Columbia, Canada. We ran a laboratory experiment with a framing likened to German corporate law which traditionally includes social standards. Our results show that a stakeholder provision, as found in both Germany and the US, cannot overcome material incentives. However, even absent incentives the stakeholder norm does not foster other regarding behavior but slightly inhibits it instead. Our experiment thus illustrates the paramount importance of taking into account both incentives and framing effects when designing institutions. We tentatively discuss potential policy implications for social enterprise legislation and the stakeholder debate.

Social Enterprise and Ethnic Minorities: Exploring the Consequences of the Evolving British Policy Agenda

Recent years have seen successive British governments move social enterprise centre stage as a policy construct. Yet there remains little understanding as to whether this policy direction provides new opportunities for engagement for migrant and ethnic minority groups or acts to reinforce past processes of exclusion. We address this issue by examining the nature and extent of migrant and ethnic minorities' involvement in social enterprise activity and the resulting implications for policy and practice. Through original empirical analysis of ethnic minority third sector organisations in East London, results are presented in relation to the challenges of defining and measuring this arena of activity, the nature of the current transition towards social enterprise forms, and the extent of engagement in the policy process. We conclude that the narrow arena of action for social enterprise activity as promoted within the current policy discourse provides little scope for engagement for the majority of small-scale ethnic minority organisations.

Exploring the Governance Challenges in Fair Trade Organizations: An Empirical Study of Three Fair Trade Organizations

This paper presents an exploratory study of board relationships in fair trade organizations (FTOs). As a form of social enterprise, FTOs are recognized for their commitment to social, economic environmental aims that co-exist with traditional business goals. In a social enterprise, of which FTOs are a type, leadership and management processes, systems and skills are performed by key people with often conflicting claims over internal authority, and consequently legitimacy. This research paper explores these processes from the perspective of the key stakeholder board members. We use interviews from three global FTOs to construct three case studies, and use the data to illustrate the benefits and challenges associated with the corporate governance of each organization. The study begins on the premise that FTOs with large, multi-national board structures are likely to encounter similar problems to their corporate counterparts. Following a review of the key nonprofit governance literature, we outline the steps taken to build the three case studies, highlighting the nature of the access granted to key board members in each organization. Subsequent interpretative analysis of the cases illustrates two major contributions to knowledge. Firstly, there are significant benefits arising from FTO governance that appear to be endogenous in origin. Principally these comprise the external opportunities arising due to the presence of a shared mission (i.e. fair trade), and the democratization of the FTO board offering equity and access to power for supplier-stakeholder groups. Additionally, there are a set of fundamental challenges confronting these organizations that are both exogenous and endogenous. Namely, these concern the development of adversarial relationships between stakeholder board members, and problems arising from board interlocks between founding partner organizations. Through these findings, we add to the growing body of empirical work surrounding social enterprises, as well as isolating some fundamental problems that face those organizations seeking global partnerships at the core of their operation. Our second and broader contribution to knowledge is in uncovering key communicative and power-based problems that arise in complex, multi-stakeholder owned organizations. Each FTO seeks to promote social, economic and political justice as part of the organizations’ core value set. However, we expose the reality of managing such complex organizations and the difficulties arising therein. This leads us to consider the impossibility of boards being able to always adhere to core values such as these. Instead, we reveal that the values are utilized to influence ambiguous or unclear executive decision-making processes.

Il Modello di Impresa Sociale 'Made in Switzerland': Risultati di un’Indagine Eeplorativa Condotta sul Piano Nazionale (The Social Enterprise 'Made in Switzerland': Findings of an Exploratory Analysis at National Level)

Thanks to the success of the country’s economic and social model, in Switzerland thinking on and practice of social economy are not so developed as in other countries. However, in the last two decades, we have observed the birth of different forms of social enterprise, initiated mainly by not-for-profit organisations.This paper sets out the principal results of an exploratory analysis of the social enterprise sector in Switzerland, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. The study focused on the aim of integrating vulnerable persons into employment.48 organisations participated in the survey, 20 of them based in German-speaking Switzerland, 21 in French-speaking Switzerland and 7 in Italian-speaking Switzerland. We have tried to cast light on the phenomenon at the national level, assessing in particular: the magnitude and genesis of the sector, the factors that have influenced its development, the awareness of social enterprise identity, the peculiarities of the Swiss situation as compared with European practice with regard to some of the EMES criteria (integration schemes, production activity, type of resource mobilisation, forms of governance). Finally, we identified 4 prototypes of social enterprise and set out some thoughts on how the Swiss social enterprise sector might develop.

Low-Profit Limited Liability Companies (L3Cs)

This paper introduces the L3C form to the public affairs literature. The Low-Profit Limited Liability Company (L3C) is a new legal form of business entity emerging in the U.S. As a form of social enterprise, L3C firms use a marketplace approach to solve social problems. The L3C form represents a radical transformation of capitalist enterprise, in that a social mission trumps profit generation. The emergence of the social enterprise movement has the potential to shift stakeholder expectations about appropriate levels of corporate social responsibility. If changes in tax policy occur, private foundations could become a major source of start-up capital for L3Cs. The result would be social enterprise claiming a larger share of commercial marketplaces. This paper explores L3C opportunities and risks from a managerial perspective, with particular focus on the public affairs implications of the L3C form.

Cui Bono, Benefit Corporation? An Experiment Inspired by Social Enterprise Legislation in Germany and the US

How do barely incentivized norms impact incentive-rich environments? We take social enterprise legislation as a case in point. It establishes rules on behalf of constituencies that have no institutionalized means of enforcing them. By relying primarily on managers' other-regarding concerns whilst leaving corporate incentive structures unaltered, how effective can such legislation be? This question is vital for the ongoing debate about social enterprise forms, as recently introduced in several US states and in British Columbia, Canada. We ran a laboratory experiment with a framing likened to German corporate law which traditionally includes social standards. Our results show that a stakeholder provision, as found in both Germany and the US, cannot overcome material incentives. However, even absent incentives the stakeholder norm does not foster other regarding behavior but slightly inhibits it instead. Our experiment thus illustrates the paramount importance of taking into account both incentives and framing effects when designing institutions. We tentatively discuss potential policy implications for social enterprise legislation and the stakeholder debate.

What’s in a Name? Making Sense of Social Enterprise Discourses

Much attention has been paid to the contested concept of “social enterprise”. A wide variety of organisational types have had the label attributed to them or have tried to claim the label for themselves. Existing academic literature provides a bewildering array of definitions and explanations for the emergence of social enterprise. This conceptual confusion is because social enterprise is a fluid and contested concept constructed by different actors promoting different discourses connected to different organisational forms and drawing upon different academic theories. This article makes sense of these different social enterprise forms, academic explanations and policy and practitioner discourses. Using the example of England, where social enterprise has been heavily promoted and supported as a site for policy intervention, an analysis of how the meanings of social enterprise have evolved and expanded over time is provided. This demonstrates that the language of social enterprise was initially developed as a way of promoting co-operative and mutual models of public and private enterprise. Its meaning expanded as other actors adopted the language to compete for policy attention and resources. Policy makers deliberately kept the definition loose to allow for the inclusion of almost any organisation claiming to be a social enterprise. This allowed them to amalgamate the positive characteristics of the different organisational forms, and so claim to be addressing a wide range of social problems using social enterprise as a policy tool.

Social enterprise in South Korea: history and diversity

PurposeThis paper aims to deal with the history and main features of social enterprises in South Korea, where a specific legal framework was enacted in 2006.Design/methodology/approachThe analysis emphasises an economic sociological approach mixing economic considerations, political features and social aspects. The mobilised information comes from previous works realised by the authors on that topic as well as from updated statistics and data about policies, laws and regulations.FindingsThe study underlines that the emergence of social enterprises in South Korea was rooted in civil society and citizens' movements before it became a priority on the government's agenda. The result is the co‐existence of several forms of social enterprise with distinctive features: social enterprises certified by the official label, on the one hand, and de facto social enterprises, defined as such because of their practices, goals and values, on the other hand. Such a situation generates a growing tension between the priorities and values emphasised by the political sphere and by the civil society.Research limitations/implicationsSocial enterprise is an emerging field of interest and a recent phenomenon, constantly in progress; consequently, systematic data on the field are still lacking, and researchers do not have enough hindsight to learn definitive lessons and draw broad conclusions of statistical significance.Originality/valueThe paper sheds light on a phenomenon that is multi‐dimensional and is rapidly evolving. It provides a better comprehension of South Korean political choices and socio‐economic changes and can help to anticipate future evolutions and to shape related policies to deal with work integration and the promotion of welfare‐mix in the field of social services provision. It also brings information and learning for cross‐country comparative studies.

Tri-Value Organization as a Form of Social Enterprise

Many depictions of social enterprises underemphasize the role of government in supporting their mission and operation. This article provides a conceptual framework and analysis of government’s financial role in one form of nonprofit social enterprise that we identify as a tri-value social enterprise. The main argument is that some forms of social enterprises are better characterized as tri-value social enterprises because their revenue sources explicitly derive from the nonprofit, for-profit, and public sectors. This analysis extends Moore’s (2000) three-part framework that distinguishes values-based differences in sources of revenue among for-profit, nonprofit, and governmental organizations. The case of the Seattle nonprofit FareStart provides an illustrative example of a tri-value social enterprise because both direct and indirect government-based revenues support FareStart’s operation as a social enterprise. The article discusses the implications for researchers and practitioners of identifying tri-value social enterprises.

CSR and social entrepreneurship: future global opportunities and challenges in Corporate Community Involvement strategies

Recently businesses and academic researchers alike have displayed increased level of interest in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and social entrepreneurship. In this paper we examine existing models of social enterprise and CSR, which is manifest externally in corporate community involvement. We propose a convergent model of CSR and social entrepreneurship whereby corporate community involvement is studied as the outcome of an interplay between micro, meso and macro levels of institutional activity, driven by corporate venturing initiatives. We suggest that corporations can benefit from developing applicable forms of social enterprise in pursuit of their CSR policies. Equally, social enterprises can incorporate corporate involvement in their funding and operational mechanisms.

Social enterprise for work integration in 12 european countries: a descriptive analysis*

Abstract**: The development of social enterprise is a rapidly emerging trend in Europe. And one sector where they have found a particularly important place is in work integration, addressing some of the more difficult problems of social exclusion in labour markets. The study on which this paper is based was a large scale comparative analysis of developments of these social enterprise in 12 European countries While there are clear differences in national contexts, there are also similarities in the forms and characteristics of these social enterprise across Europe. It is argued that this form of social enterprise has proved effective and is an important innovation to address problems of more marginalised groups and individuals, but there remain issues about how to sustain and promote the good models and good practices developed.