You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
In recent decades, governments have promoted social enterprise as a means to address welfare and tackle disadvantage. Early academic work on social enterprises reflected this development and engaged with their ability to deliver and create jobs, work towards remedial environmental goals, and address a range of societal challenges. More recently, researchers have started to investigate the broader potential of social enterprise for the wellbeing of people and the planet. In this context, this book aims to answer the question: In what ways can social enterprises improve the health and wellbeing of individuals and communities? The chapters in this edited collection take different perspectives o...
For several decades, social enterprises have been pioneers in the conception and implementation of a pathbreaking social innovation: Fair Trade (FT). Fair Trade Social Enterprises have created a movement which has challenged mainstream trading practices and offered development opportunities for disadvantaged producer groups in the South. Starting from a niche market aimed at convinced customers, FT has expanded and entered mainstream retailing outlets, growing in visibility and market share, while simultaneously experiencing diversification of its organization models. While pioneer Fair Trade Social Enterprises in the early years were largely nonprofit organizations relying on voluntary work...
In the last two decades, the quest for a widely accepted definition of social enterprise has been a central issue in a great number of publications. The main objective of the ICSEM Project (on which this book is based) was to show that the social enterprise field would benefit much more from linking conceptualisation efforts to the huge diversity of social enterprises than from an additional and ambitious attempt at providing an encompassing definition. Starting from a hypothesis that could be termed "the impossibility of a unified definition", the ICSEM research strategy relied on bottom-up approaches to capture the social enterprise phenomenon in its local and national contexts. This strat...
In the last two decades, the quest for a widely accepted definition of social enterprise has been a central issue in a great number of publications. The main objective of the ICSEM Project on which this book is based was to show that the social enterprise field would benefit much more from linking conceptualisation efforts to the huge diversity of social enterprises than from an additional and ambitious attempt at providing an encompassing definition. Starting from a hypothesis that could be termed "the impossibility of a unified definition", the ICSEM research strategy relied on bottom-up approaches to capture the social enterprise phenomenon in its local and national contexts. This strateg...
Sustainable entrepreneurship has attracted growing attention in both scholarly and practitioner circles. Focusing on generating social, environmental and business value, the notion has been raised more recently to address the contribution of entrepreneurial activities to sustainable economic and social development. Sustainable Entrepreneurship and Social Innovation builds on a theoretical framework that addresses related topics via a combination of insights from sustainability, policy, managerial, strategic, innovation and institutional perspectives. Providing empirical casework as well as a conceptual and theoretical framework, the book takes a global, interdisciplinary approach to the emer...
'Social innovation’ can be simply defined as the new ideas and initiatives that make it possible to meet our society’s challenges in areas such as the environment, education, employment, culture, health and economic development. It is currently becoming increasingly important as a central concept for social theories and politics. This edited volume brings together interdisciplinary contributions which examine the complex interrelation between innovation and social problems, a link which has been surprisingly underexplored in academia and practice thus far. Social Innovation: New Forms of Organisation in Knowledge–Based Societies examines the mutual interdependence of innovation process...
In the past decades, social enterprise has been an emerging field of research. Its main frameworks have been provided by Occidental approaches. Mainly based on an organizational vision, they give little or no room to questions such as gender, race, colonialism, class, power relations and intertwined forms of inequality. However, a wide range of worldwide hidden, popular initiatives can be considered as another form of social enterprises based on solidarity, re-embedding the economy as well as broadening the political scope. This has been shown in a previous book: Civil Society, the Third Sector, and Social Enterprise: Governance and Democracy. Thus, to be more than a fashion or a fictitious panacea, the concept of social enterprise needs to be debated. Southern realities cannot be only understood through imported categories and outside modeled guidelines. This book engages a multicontinental and pluridisciplinary discussion in order to provide a pluralist theory of social enterprise. The book will be of interest to researchers, academics and students in the fields of social entrepreneurship, social innovation, development studies, management studies and social work.
In the absence of a widely accepted and common definition of social enterprise (SE), a large research project, the "International Comparative Social Enterprise Models" (ICSEM) Project, was carried out over a five-year period; it involved more than 200 researchers from 55 countries and relied on bottom-up approaches to capture the SE phenomenon. This strategy made it possible to take into account and give legitimacy to locally embedded approaches, thus resulting in an analysis encompassing a wide diversity of social enterprises, while simultaneously allowing for the identification of major SE models to delineate the field on common grounds at the international level. These SE models reveal or...
In the world of creating new ventures with the single goal of achieving financial profitability, it is well known that nine of ten startups are likely to fail. For new social ventures that have the twin goals of financial profitability and social inclusiveness, the chances of failures are even higher. This book provides insight into the common struggles of social activists and the strategic responses necessary to not only overcome their organizational issues but also address the world’s pressing social challenges. The book not only traces the journey of the social activists in growing their social ventures to flesh out real-life issues but also introduces the latest management thinking on social innovation in daily business decision. This book makes a useful contribution in furthering the concepts of social innovation and entrepreneurship and inspiring more change agents to create and implement effective, scalable and sustainable solutions to address social issues and meet the needs of the disadvantaged groups in the society.
Although co-design has been practised in new service and product development for some years, it has only recently begun to appear in the burgeoning field of social innovation. It appears to be well-attuned to this new context, offering as it does an open-ended relational process to generate novel solutions to problems whose very definition seems to escape more conventional approaches. However, even less research attention has been paid to co-design than to social innovation. This book explores the potential of co-design as a social innovation process. It reviews the diverse theoretical and disciplinary foundations on which co-design is based. It proposes a framework for understanding co-design as a cohesive practice across the extremely broad scope of its potential applications. It explores appropriate approaches to governance and evaluation of co-design initiatives and outlines the key issues and limitations on its use. Although it is intended to provide a robust theoretical basis for researching co-design initiatives, it will also be of interest to anyone who is contemplating putting co-design into practice.