Discourses of Social Entrepreneurship – Variations of the same theme?
Lars HULGÅRD, 2010
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Résumé :
Why has social entrepreneurship managed to attract so much attention in recent years? Why is it
a rapidly expanding field of interest across all sectors in contemporary society? In the
commercial market sector, social entrepreneurship is closely related to - and yet different from -
such corporate strategies as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Corporate Social Innovation
(CSI) and the Triple Bottom Line. In the public sector, social entrepreneurship is related to an
experimental turn in social policy and planning that has been taking place in European countries
and the EU since the 1980s; we see this both in relation to urban planning (which is now
emphasising collaborative planning and local capacity building) and in participatory socialpolicies. In social policy, the poverty programs launched by the EU pioneered, together with pilot
programs in a number of European countries, the interest in making social policy more
responsive to the participation of both street-level workers and ordinary citizens. In the third
sector, social entrepreneurship is related in Europe to a transition within non-profit organisations
and voluntary associations, which evolve in the direction of becoming agents on a market and
providers of welfare services, and in the USA to a dramatic growth in the impact of the third
sector since the mid-1980s.
Research on social entrepreneurship was, in its initial phase, driven in the USA and Europe by
practitioners and researchers partly with common approaches and understandings and partly with
some major distinctions. As such, the field is composed of a mixture of common trends and
backgrounds, on the one hand, and of a considerable amount of variation in the ways social
entrepreneurship is emerging, on the other hand; this variation is the result of changing balances
and relations between state, market and civil society in the provision of welfare services and
work integration in the USA and Europe.
After defining social entrepreneurship, we will first discuss two common features in the current
intensive interest, among academics, experts and policy makers, in social enterprises and social
entrepreneurship as a way of renewing the welfare state and most of all a way of reframing the
balance between the three sectors - state, market and civil society. We will then stress some basic
variations between powerful mainstream discourses of social entrepreneurship in respectively the
USA and Europe. Finally we will conclude by emphasising that benefits can be gained, from both
the common trends and the variations, by developing a method of transatlantic social
entrepreneurship learning.
Sources :
© EMES European Research Network 2010
Site web de EMES www.emes.net