ABSTRACT
The authors note the difference between North American and European approaches to this issue. The latter, based largely on the work of EMES (the European Association for Social Enterprise Research), emphasizes the importance of participative governance. The authors claim a need to deepen the political dimension beyond participative governance. Going in such a direction, they argue for the need to examine carefully the realities (including the informal ones) of different continents. With this new impulse, the authors propose an ideal type of social enterprise from a solidarity economy perspective. They based it on three dimensions – economic, social and political (already present in the previous work of EMES). On the political side, they argue for the publicness of mission services as intermediaries in public spaces, institutional entrepreneurship and political embeddedness. The authors suggest that this comprehensive framework can accommodate diverse cultural perspectives.
The international debate on social enterprise is at present mainly driven by English-language research. The historical trajectory of European social enterprises, which links them to organizations of the social economy, thus explains the importance of criteria of participation, decision-making not related to capital ownership and the limits of profit distribution. Particularly in Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua, popular solidarity enterprises have given rise to new public policies and new frameworks of laws and norms that try to redefine the meaning of modernity via a pluralistic vision of the economy, which is of course not exempt from contradictions or excesses. As an ideal type, the concept of the solidarity enterprise is a heuristic instrument, useful in the search for causal, not accidental, connections that are at work within the experiences of the solidarity economy and that constitute indicators as a specific category of economic initiatives.
