ABSTRACT
This chapter underlines that the concepts of social enterprise and social entrepreneurship have different meanings across different cultural settings. In the European context, we can distinguish three main fields in which social enterprises perform their economic activity: work integration social enterprises; enterprises with the primary aim of producing goods and services with social utility or that are driven by a collective interest; and enterprises that foster local economic and social development through the promotion of citizen and local government participation in managing activities. A social enterprise can be established as an independent organization, or can be partly or entirely owned by a for-profit or nonprofit enterprise. A new type of social enterprise (hybrid type) is the "community-based enterprise", which is a recent phenomenon that aims to create advantages in favour of a community, through the production of goods and services and the involvement of its members. This form of social enterprise is characterized by the "multi-stakeholder" approach.
