ABSTRACT
During the last two decades, starting in the mid-1980s, a remarkable connection between features usually considered as belonging to the sphere of civil society and characteristics usually related to market economics has evolved as a trend in the not-for-profit sector: the emergence of social entrepreneurship. Concepts and understandings related to social science all of a sudden ended up intertwined with the vocabulary of market economics: ‘entrepreneurship’, ‘innovation’, ‘capital’ and so on. Social entrepreneurs, it is said, are the equivalents of business entrepreneurs ‘but they operate in the social, not-for-profit sector, building “something from nothing” and seeking new and innovative solutions to social problems’.1
