Social Enterprises in Changing Welfare States

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

This panel proposal is based on papers derived from country contributions to the International Comparative Social Enterprise Models (ICSEM) Project launched in July 2013.

The ICSEM Project is a worldwide research project aiming to compare social enterprise models across countries. Over 200 researchers are working together under the coordination of Jacques Defourny (CES, University of Liege, Belgium) and Marthe Nyssens (CIRTES, Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium). Some 50 countries are covered, in all regions of the world.

So far, the ICSEM Project has resulted in “country contributions” prepared by local research partners to address three major topics:

1. Understanding contexts and concepts

The first part deals with historical, contextual and conceptual issues about the emergence of social enterprise in each country.

2. Mapping social enterprise models

The aim of this second part is to identify and characterize the various types/models of social enterprises: fields of activity, social mission, target groups, operational model, stakeholders, legal frameworks, and so on.

3. Institutionalization processes of social enterprise models

The aim of this third part is to analyze the extent to which social enterprise models identified here above are currently institutionalized and to examine the processes through which these institutional frameworks have emerged.

This panel proposal is made of papers focusing on the analysis of social enterprises in three advanced economies experiencing changes in their welfare regimes although to various degrees: Austria, Finland and Israel. In Austria, the various SE models tend to remain strongly interlinked with public bodies in terms of external facilitation, which sometimes threatens the organizational autonomy and the participatory governance of social enterprises. This also seems to be the case in Finland where social enterprises often provide public welfare services or are used by public policies to fight unemployment of the hard-to-place. As to Israel, the third paper stresses the emergence of social enterprises incorporated within the public sector, among various other models. More precisely, two public sector SE models can be identified as they combined differently their social mission and their economic goals. In all three countries, changes in the roles of the State and the emergence of social enterprises also go along with evolutions of the overall third sector.

Paper 1: Social Enterprise Models in Austria: a Contextual Approach to Understand an Ambiguous Concept
Paper 2: A Typology of Social Enterprise Models in Finland
Paper 3: The Development of Social Enterprises within the Public Sector in Israel

Sub Unit

• Social Innovation and Social Enterprise

Chair

• Carlo Borzaga, ISSAN - Istituto Studi Sviluppo

Individual Presentations

• Social Enterprise Models in Austria: a Contextual Approach to Understand an Ambiguous Concept - Maria Anastasiadis, University of Graz; Richard Lang, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Institute for Innovation Management

• A Typology of Social Enterprise Models in Finland - Harri Kostilainen, Diaconia University of Applied Sciences, University of Eastern Finland; Eeva Houtbeckers, Aalto University; Pekka Pättiniemi, Finnish Social Enterprise Research Network Association FinSERN

• The Development of Social Enterprises within the Public Sector in Israel - Yisca Monnickendam-Givon, The Hebrew University and The College of Management Academic Studies

Session Organizer

• Jacques Defourny, University of Liege