ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at place-based business as an alternative approach to social enterprise. It reviews the literature and criticisms of social enterprise. The chapter explores the commonalities between the examples. Common attributes of such businesses include a focus on creating social equity and innovations in socio-legal structures. Place-based businesses are alternatives to traditional business, but they also differ from most social enterprises in their ability meaningfully to engage in market-based circuits of capital. Critical discussions on alternative and social economies must address issues of wealth creation and the relationship between the local and the global. The social economy has become another way to redistribute wealth rather than an alternative means of producing wealth. The Mondragon Cooperative Corporation (MCC) is a complex of worker cooperatives and related organisations headquartered in the Basque country on Spain's northern Atlantic coast.
