ABSTRACT

This chapter reviews the context in which social enterprises operate in Finland. It then provides an overview of the institutionalised and non-institutionalised forms of social enterprise in the country. It also presents the new typology of social enterprise in Finland, as well as four emblematic examples illustrating the different types of social enterprise. The chapter discusses social-value creation in different aspects of social enterprises' activity, before analysing typology in relation to the findings generated by the International Comparative Social Enterprise Models project. The role of social-economy organisations changed when the welfare state emerged, developed and matured, in the period that extended from the 1940s to the 1980s. Institutionalised social enterprises include work-integration social enterprises and organisations that have been awarded the "Social Enterprise Mark" label. The ICSEM Project has put forward a typology including four major models of social enterprise, namely the entrepreneurial non-profit (ENP), the social-cooperative (SC), the social business (SB) and the public-sector social enterprise (PSE) models.