ABSTRACT
Many journal articles, books and publications on social enterprise and social entrepreneurship start by arguing that the field is dominated by confusion and the lack of rigorous definitions and of conceptual clarity. This may have been the case in the late 1990s and early years of the 21st century. However, today we are moving towards a situation of advanced analytical insights in the specificities of organizations and enterprises that do not belong to the private-for-profit sector or to the public sector, defined in conventional ways. Many of the concepts used to analyze them have been shaped in specific national contexts and thus may be difficult to translate in other languages. Some of them have reached an international recognition and a more or less homogenous understanding, but they generally designate specific subsets of organizations; this is the case of terms such as cooperatives, foundations and associations.
