Routledge Studies in Social Enterprise & Social Innovation – serie

In the last two decades, the quest for a widely accepted definition of social enterprise has been a central issue in a great number of publications.The main objective of the ICSEM Project on which this book is based was to show that the social enterprise field would benefit much more from linking conceptualisation efforts to the huge diversity of social enterprises than from an additional and ambitious attempt at providing an encompassing definition. Starting from a hypothesis that could be termed "the impossibility of a unified definition", the ICSEM research strategy relied on bottom-up approaches to capture the social enterprise phenomenon in its local and national contexts. This strategy made it possible to take into account and give legitimacy to locally embedded approaches, while simultaneously allowing for the identification of major social enterprise models to delineate the field on common grounds at the international level.Social Enterprise in Western Europe –the third volume in a series of four ICSEM-based books on social enterprise worldwide – will serve as a key reference and resource for teachers, researchers, students, experts, policy makers, journalists and others who want to acquire a broad understanding of the social enterprise and social entrepreneurship phenomena as they emerge and develop in this region.

In the absence of a widely accepted and common definition of social enterprise (SE), a large research project, the "International Comparative Social Enterprise Models" (ICSEM) Project, was carried out over a five-year period; it involved more than 200 researchers from 55 countries and relied on bottom-up approaches to capture the SE phenomenon. This strategy made it possible to take into account and give legitimacy to locally embedded approaches, thus resulting in an analysis encompassing a wide diversity of social enterprises, while simultaneously allowing for the identification of major SE models to delineate the field on common grounds at the international level.These SE models reveal or confirm an overall trend towards new ways of sharing the responsibility for the common good in today’s economies and societies. We tend to consider as good news the fact that social enterprises actually stem from all parts of the economy. Indeed, societies are facing many complex challenges at all levels, from the local to the global level. The diversity and internal variety of SE models are a sign of a broadly shared willingness to develop appropriate although sometimes embryonic—responses to these challenges, on the basis of innovative economic/business models driven by a social mission. In spite of their weaknesses, social enterprises may be seen as advocates for and vehicles of the general interest across the whole economy. Of course, the debate about privatisation, deregulation and globalised market competition—all factors that may hinder efforts in the search for the common good–has to be addressed as well.The second of a series of four ICSEM books, Social Enterprise in Latin America will serve as a key reference and resource for teachers, researchers, students, experts, policy makers, journalists and other categories of people who want to acquire a broad understanding of the phenomena of social enterprise and social entrepreneurship as they emerge and develop across the world.

In the absence of a widely accepted and common definition of social enterprise (SE), a large research project, the "International Comparative Social Enterprise Models" (ICSEM) Project, was carried out over a five-year period; it involved more than 200 researchers from 55 countries and relied on bottom-up approaches to capture the SE phenomenon. This strategy made it possible to take into account and give legitimacy to locally embedded approaches, thus resulting in an analysis encompassing a wide diversity of social enterprises, while simultaneously allowing for the identification of major SE models to delineate the field on common grounds at the international level.These SE models reveal or confirm an overall trend towards new ways of sharing the responsibility for the common good in today’s economies and societies. We tend to consider as good news the fact that social enterprises actually stem from all parts of the economy. Indeed, societies are facing many complex challenges at all levels, from the local to the global level. The diversity and internal variety of SE models are a sign of a broadly shared willingness to develop appropriate—although sometimes embryonic—responses to these challenges, on the basis of innovative economic/business models driven by a social mission. In spite of their weaknesses, social enterprises may be seen as advocates for and vehicles of the general interest across the whole economy. Of course, the debate about privatisation, deregulation and globalised market competition—all factors that may hinder efforts in the search for the common good–has to be addressed as well.The first of a series of four ICSEM books, Social Enterprise in Asia will serve as a key reference and resource for teachers, researchers, students, experts, policy makers, journalists and other categories of people who want to acquire a broad understanding of the phenomena of social enterprise and social entrepreneurship as they emerge and develop across the world.

Although co-design has been practised in new service and product development for some years, it has only recently begun to appear in the burgeoning field of social innovation. It appears to be well-attuned to this new context, offering as it does an open-ended relational process to generate novel solutions to problems whose very definition seems to escape more conventional approaches. However, even less research attention has been paid to co-design than to social innovation.This book explores the potential of co-design as a social innovation process. It reviews the diverse theoretical and disciplinary foundations on which co-design is based. It proposes a framework for understanding co-design as a cohesive practice across the extremely broad scope of its potential applications. It explores appropriate approaches to governance and evaluation of co-design initiatives and outlines the key issues and limitations on its use. Although it is intended to provide a robust theoretical basis for researching co-design initiatives, it will also be of interest to anyone who is contemplating putting co-design into practice.

In the past decades, social enterprise has been an emerging field of research. Its main frameworks have been provided by Occidental approaches. Mainly based on an organizational vision, they give little or no room to questions such as gender, race, colonialism, class, power relations and intertwined forms of inequality. However, a wide range of worldwide hidden, popular initiatives can be considered as another form of social enterprises based on solidarity, re-embedding the economy as well as broadening the political scope. This has been shown in a previous book: Civil Society, the Third Sector, and Social Enterprise: Governance and Democracy.Thus, to be more than a fashion or a fictitious panacea, the concept of social enterprise needs to be debated. Southern realities cannot be only understood through imported categories and outside modeled guidelines. This book engages a multicontinental and pluridisciplinary discussion in order to provide a pluralist theory of social enterprise. The book will be of interest to researchers, academics and students in the fields of social entrepreneurship, social innovation, development studies, management studies and social work.

In the last two decades, the quest for a widely accepted definition of social enterprise has been a central issue in a great number of publications.The main objective of the ICSEM Project (on which this book is based) was to show that the social enterprise field would benefit much more from linking conceptualisation efforts to the huge diversity of social enterprises than from an additional and ambitious attempt at providing an encompassing definition. Starting from a hypothesis that could be termed "the impossibility of a unified definition", the ICSEM research strategy relied on bottom-up approaches to capture the social enterprise phenomenon in its local and national contexts. This strategy made it possible to take into account and give legitimacy to locally embedded approaches, while simultaneously allowing for the identification of major social enterprise models to delineate the field on common grounds at the international level.Social Enterprise in Central and Eastern Europe – the last volume in a series of four ICSEM-based books on social enterprise worldwide — will serve as a key reference and resource for teachers, researchers, students, experts, policy makers, journalists and others who want to acquire a broad understanding of the social enterprise and social entrepreneurship phenomena as they emerge and develop in this region.

The Latin American continent contains an incredibly rich diversity from which humans derive a range of ecosystem services (e.g. material goods, cultural benefits, climate regulation, etc.) that contribute to livelihoods and well-being. It has become critical to reconcile social and environmental issues in the region to ensure that development is sustainable and aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals. To ensure the sustainable use and management of social and natural capital in the region, business, government, social enterprises and NGOs are engaging in different forms of social innovation that account for social, ecological and environmental values. This requires the integration of social and natural capital into decision-making at all levels. Latin America presents a useful scenario to explore social innovation in relation to social and environmental values and the management of local human and natural resources. This book presents social innovation initiatives that incorporate social and natural capital into decision-making processes in Latin America. This book aims to provide the reader with an insight into the relevance of social innovation for maintaining and restoring social and natural capital in Latin America. Using case studies from Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Chile and Mexico, this book provides an insight into the interactions between social innovation and social and natural capital in Latin America and will be of interest to researchers, academics and students in the fields of social innovation, management studies, environmental economics and sustainability.

In recent decades, governments have promoted social enterprise as a means to address welfare and tackle disadvantage. Early academic work on social enterprises reflected this development and engaged with their ability to deliver and create jobs, work towards remedial environmental goals, and address a range of societal challenges. More recently, researchers have started to investigate the broader potential of social enterprise for the wellbeing of people and the planet.In this context, this book aims to answer the question: In what ways can social enterprises improve the health and wellbeing of individuals and communities? The chapters in this edited collection take different perspectives on assessing how social enterprises address disadvantage and deliver health and wellbeing impacts. Drawing on evidence from international research studies, Social Enterprise, Health, and Wellbeing: Theory, Methods, and Practice presents the ‘first wave’ of innovative research on this topic and provides a platform of evidence to inspire the next generation of scholarly and policy interest. Drawing on the cutting edge of interdisciplinary research in the field, this book will be of interest to researchers, academics, policymakers, and students in the fields of entrepreneurship, public and social policy, community development, public health, human geography, and urban planning.

In recent decades, governments have promoted social enterprise as a means to address welfare and tackle disadvantage. Early academic work on social enterprises reflected this development and engaged with their ability to deliver and create jobs, work towards remedial environmental goals, and address a range of societal challenges. More recently, researchers have started to investigate the broader potential of social enterprise for the wellbeing of people and the planet.In this context, this book aims to answer the question: In what ways can social enterprises improve the health and wellbeing of individuals and communities? The chapters in this edited collection take different perspectives on assessing how social enterprises address disadvantage and deliver health and wellbeing impacts. Drawing on evidence from international research studies, Social Enterprise, Health, and Wellbeing: Theory, Methods, and Practice presents the ‘first wave’ of innovative research on this topic and provides a platform of evidence to inspire the next generation of scholarly and policy interest. Drawing on the cutting edge of interdisciplinary research in the field, this book will be of interest to researchers, academics, policymakers, and students in the fields of entrepreneurship, public and social policy, community development, public health, human geography, and urban planning.

In the absence of a widely accepted and common definition of social enterprise (SE), a large research project, the "International Comparative Social Enterprise Models" (ICSEM) Project, was carried out over a five-year period; it involved more than 200 researchers from 55 countries and relied on bottom-up approaches to capture the SE phenomenon. This strategy made it possible to take into account and give legitimacy to locally embedded approaches, thus resulting in an analysis encompassing a wide diversity of social enterprises, while simultaneously allowing for the identification of major SE models to delineate the field on common grounds at the international level.These SE models reveal or confirm an overall trend towards new ways of sharing the responsibility for the common good in today’s economies and societies. We tend to consider as good news the fact that social enterprises actually stem from all parts of the economy. Indeed, societies are facing many complex challenges at all levels, from the local to the global level. The diversity and internal variety of SE models are a sign of a broadly shared willingness to develop appropriate although sometimes embryonic—responses to these challenges, on the basis of innovative economic/business models driven by a social mission. In spite of their weaknesses, social enterprises may be seen as advocates for and vehicles of the general interest across the whole economy. Of course, the debate about privatisation, deregulation and globalised market competition—all factors that may hinder efforts in the search for the common good–has to be addressed as well.The second of a series of four ICSEM books, Social Enterprise in Latin America will serve as a key reference and resource for teachers, researchers, students, experts, policy makers, journalists and other categories of people who want to acquire a broad understanding of the phenomena of social enterprise and social entrepreneurship as they emerge and develop across the world.

In the absence of a widely accepted and common definition of social enterprise (SE), a large research project, the "International Comparative Social Enterprise Models" (ICSEM) Project, was carried out over a five-year period; it involved more than 200 researchers from 55 countries and relied on bottom-up approaches to capture the SE phenomenon. This strategy made it possible to take into account and give legitimacy to locally embedded approaches, thus resulting in an analysis encompassing a wide diversity of social enterprises, while simultaneously allowing for the identification of major SE models to delineate the field on common grounds at the international level.These SE models reveal or confirm an overall trend towards new ways of sharing the responsibility for the common good in today’s economies and societies. We tend to consider as good news the fact that social enterprises actually stem from all parts of the economy. Indeed, societies are facing many complex challenges at all levels, from the local to the global level. The diversity and internal variety of SE models are a sign of a broadly shared willingness to develop appropriate—although sometimes embryonic—responses to these challenges, on the basis of innovative economic/business models driven by a social mission. In spite of their weaknesses, social enterprises may be seen as advocates for and vehicles of the general interest across the whole economy. Of course, the debate about privatisation, deregulation and globalised market competition—all factors that may hinder efforts in the search for the common good–has to be addressed as well.The first of a series of four ICSEM books, Social Enterprise in Asia will serve as a key reference and resource for teachers, researchers, students, experts, policy makers, journalists and other categories of people who want to acquire a broad understanding of the phenomena of social enterprise and social entrepreneurship as they emerge and develop across the world.

The Latin American continent contains an incredibly rich diversity from which humans derive a range of ecosystem services (e.g. material goods, cultural benefits, climate regulation, etc.) that contribute to livelihoods and well-being. It has become critical to reconcile social and environmental issues in the region to ensure that development is sustainable and aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals. To ensure the sustainable use and management of social and natural capital in the region, business, government, social enterprises and NGOs are engaging in different forms of social innovation that account for social, ecological and environmental values. This requires the integration of social and natural capital into decision-making at all levels. Latin America presents a useful scenario to explore social innovation in relation to social and environmental values and the management of local human and natural resources. This book presents social innovation initiatives that incorporate social and natural capital into decision-making processes in Latin America. This book aims to provide the reader with an insight into the relevance of social innovation for maintaining and restoring social and natural capital in Latin America. Using case studies from Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Chile and Mexico, this book provides an insight into the interactions between social innovation and social and natural capital in Latin America and will be of interest to researchers, academics and students in the fields of social innovation, management studies, environmental economics and sustainability.

In the last two decades, the quest for a widely accepted definition of social enterprise has been a central issue in a great number of publications.The main objective of the ICSEM Project on which this book is based was to show that the social enterprise field would benefit much more from linking conceptualisation efforts to the huge diversity of social enterprises than from an additional and ambitious attempt at providing an encompassing definition. Starting from a hypothesis that could be termed "the impossibility of a unified definition", the ICSEM research strategy relied on bottom-up approaches to capture the social enterprise phenomenon in its local and national contexts. This strategy made it possible to take into account and give legitimacy to locally embedded approaches, while simultaneously allowing for the identification of major social enterprise models to delineate the field on common grounds at the international level.Social Enterprise in Western Europe –the third volume in a series of four ICSEM-based books on social enterprise worldwide – will serve as a key reference and resource for teachers, researchers, students, experts, policy makers, journalists and others who want to acquire a broad understanding of the social enterprise and social entrepreneurship phenomena as they emerge and develop in this region.

Social Innovation: Comparative Perspectives investigates socio-economic impact. Since it is hard to establish causality and to measure social properties when investigating impact, especially at the level of society, the book narrows down impact to one priority aspect: social innovation – understood as organizations’ capacity to generate novel ideas, ways and means of doing things, of addressing public and social problems of many kinds.This volume’s primary assertion is that the Third Sector, specifically through stimulating civic involvement, is best placed to produce social innovation, outperforming business firms and state agencies in this regard. By investigating actor contributions to social innovation across seven fields of activity, Social innovation: Comparative Perspectives develops our understanding of why and how the Third Sector is central to functioning, cohesive and viable societies.This volume is based on contributions of the project "ITSSOIN – Impact of the Third Sector as Social Innovation" funded by the European Commission under the 7th framework programme. It will be of insight across disciplines, in particular to the growing social innovation community, innovation researchers more generally and to non-profit scholars. The practical relevance of the book will be of interest to European and national policy makers and practitioners across different sectors.

The Italian Cooperative Sector is amongst the largest in the world comprising over 60,000 cooperatives from all sectors of the economy directly employing 1.3 million people. Cooperatives created close to 30 percent of new jobs in Italy between 2001 and 2011 demonstrating that democratic cooperative enterprises can successfully operate in a market economy combining economic success and social responsibility. These offer a viable alternative to profit maximising enterprises and an opportunity to create a more pluralist and democratic market economy.The Growth of Italian Cooperatives: Innovation, Resilience and Social Responsibility comprehensively explains how the Italian cooperative sector has managed to compete successfully in the global economy and to grow during the global financial crisis. This book will comprehensively explain how the Italian cooperative movement has managed to grow into a large successful network of cooperatives. It will examine the legislative framework and their unique business model that allows it to compete in the market as part of a network that includes central cooperative associations, financial and economic consortia, and financial companies. It will explore cooperative entrepreneurship through a discussion of the formation of cooperative groups, start-ups, worker-buyouts and the promotion of entirely new sectors such as the social services sector. Finally, The Growth of Italian Cooperatives examines how cooperatives have managed the GFC and how their behavior differs from private enterprises. It will also analyze the extent to which cooperatives compete while still uphold the key cooperative principles and fulfil their social responsibility. This book is an interdisciplinary study of cooperative development and is designed to inform members of the academic community, government, public policy makers and cooperative managers that are primarily interested in economic democracy, economics of the cooperative enterprise, cooperative networks and economic development, cooperative legislation, democratic governance, job creation programs, politics of inclusion and how wealth can be more equitably distributed.

In the last two decades, the quest for a widely accepted definition of social enterprise has been a central issue in a great number of publications.The main objective of the ICSEM Project (on which this book is based) was to show that the social enterprise field would benefit much more from linking conceptualisation efforts to the huge diversity of social enterprises than from an additional and ambitious attempt at providing an encompassing definition. Starting from a hypothesis that could be termed "the impossibility of a unified definition", the ICSEM research strategy relied on bottom-up approaches to capture the social enterprise phenomenon in its local and national contexts. This strategy made it possible to take into account and give legitimacy to locally embedded approaches, while simultaneously allowing for the identification of major social enterprise models to delineate the field on common grounds at the international level.Social Enterprise in Central and Eastern Europe – the last volume in a series of four ICSEM-based books on social enterprise worldwide — will serve as a key reference and resource for teachers, researchers, students, experts, policy makers, journalists and others who want to acquire a broad understanding of the social enterprise and social entrepreneurship phenomena as they emerge and develop in this region.

In the past decades, social enterprise has been an emerging field of research. Its main frameworks have been provided by Occidental approaches. Mainly based on an organizational vision, they give little or no room to questions such as gender, race, colonialism, class, power relations and intertwined forms of inequality. However, a wide range of worldwide hidden, popular initiatives can be considered as another form of social enterprises based on solidarity, re-embedding the economy as well as broadening the political scope. This has been shown in a previous book: Civil Society, the Third Sector, and Social Enterprise: Governance and Democracy.Thus, to be more than a fashion or a fictitious panacea, the concept of social enterprise needs to be debated. Southern realities cannot be only understood through imported categories and outside modeled guidelines. This book engages a multicontinental and pluridisciplinary discussion in order to provide a pluralist theory of social enterprise. The book will be of interest to researchers, academics and students in the fields of social entrepreneurship, social innovation, development studies, management studies and social work.

Social Innovation is emerging as an alternate interdisciplinary development pathway of knowledge and practice that aims to understand and address contemporary complexities and multi – dimensional social realities. BEPA (2011) defines social innovation as, ‘innovations that are social in both their ends and means’. However, though Social Innovation is a widely-used term; its conceptual understanding and the specific relation to social change remains under explored. People Centered Social Innovation: Global perspectives on an Emerging Paradigm attempts to revisit and extend the existing understanding of Social Innovation in practice by focusing upon the lived realities of marginalized groups and communities. The emerging field of people-centered development is placed in dialogue with theory and concepts from the more established field of social innovation to create a new approach; one that adopts a global perspective, engaging with very different experiences of marginality across the global north and south. Theoretically, ‘People Centered Social Innovation: Global Perspectives on an Emerging Paradigm’ draws upon ‘northern’ understandings of change and improvement as well as ‘southern’ theory concerns for epistemological diversity and meaning making. The result is an experiment aimed at reimagining research and practice that seriously needs to center the actor in processes of social transformation.

Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Rural Europe investigates how social entrepreneurship advances social innovation in rural Europe and contributes to fighting social and economic challenges in these regions. Based on longitudinal data collected in four European countries, this book explains how social enterprises enact their business model based on an entrepreneurial reconfiguration of resources they obtain from their network relations, and how their activities empower local communities, driving change and eventually innovation. In these activities, the entrepreneurial mindset and the role as intermediary between different groups and domains of society help to reframe challenges into opportunities. The argument in this book develops from a description of what social enterprises report to do to an analysis of how they do it, and results in an explanation of why they take these actions. In doing so it gradually broadens the view from a focus on the social enterprises themselves to their interactions and network partners and, finally, to their positioning in societal fields. The presented model complements network theory with the concept of strategic action fields. This book reveals the crucial role of social entrepreneurship in innovation in rural regions, and the rich insights provided have far reaching implications for research, practice and policy. This book will appeal to everyone interested in the interface of social entrepreneurship, innovation, and regional/rural development, either on a practical or academic level.

Social regeneration is about the transformative processes that, through institutional choices that embody cooperation and inclusion, develop opportunities and capabilities for weak categories, and transversally for society. The challenge of social regeneration can be addressed, in part, through organisational solutions increasingly identified with social economy organisations, since they are characterised by a social objective, cooperation and inclusive democratic governance.Besides the organisational element, Social Regeneration and Local Development provides a new perspective on interacting socio-economic factors, which can work in synergy with the social economy organisations model to promote and sustain social regeneration and well-being. Such elements include civic engagement and social capital, the nature of the welfare system, the use of physical assets in urban and rural areas, leadership, technology, and finance.By analysing organisational and contextual elements, this book offers an institutional perspective on how socio-economic systems can reply to challenges such as social and environmental degradation, financial crises, immigration, inequality, and marginalisation.

Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Rural Europe investigates how social entrepreneurship advances social innovation in rural Europe and contributes to fighting social and economic challenges in these regions. Based on longitudinal data collected in four European countries, this book explains how social enterprises enact their business model based on an entrepreneurial reconfiguration of resources they obtain from their network relations, and how their activities empower local communities, driving change and eventually innovation. In these activities, the entrepreneurial mindset and the role as intermediary between different groups and domains of society help to reframe challenges into opportunities. The argument in this book develops from a description of what social enterprises report to do to an analysis of how they do it, and results in an explanation of why they take these actions. In doing so it gradually broadens the view from a focus on the social enterprises themselves to their interactions and network partners and, finally, to their positioning in societal fields. The presented model complements network theory with the concept of strategic action fields. This book reveals the crucial role of social entrepreneurship in innovation in rural regions, and the rich insights provided have far reaching implications for research, practice and policy. This book will appeal to everyone interested in the interface of social entrepreneurship, innovation, and regional/rural development, either on a practical or academic level.

Social Innovation is emerging as an alternate interdisciplinary development pathway of knowledge and practice that aims to understand and address contemporary complexities and multi – dimensional social realities. BEPA (2011) defines social innovation as, ‘innovations that are social in both their ends and means’. However, though Social Innovation is a widely-used term; its conceptual understanding and the specific relation to social change remains under explored. People Centered Social Innovation: Global perspectives on an Emerging Paradigm attempts to revisit and extend the existing understanding of Social Innovation in practice by focusing upon the lived realities of marginalized groups and communities. The emerging field of people-centered development is placed in dialogue with theory and concepts from the more established field of social innovation to create a new approach; one that adopts a global perspective, engaging with very different experiences of marginality across the global north and south. Theoretically, ‘People Centered Social Innovation: Global Perspectives on an Emerging Paradigm’ draws upon ‘northern’ understandings of change and improvement as well as ‘southern’ theory concerns for epistemological diversity and meaning making. The result is an experiment aimed at reimagining research and practice that seriously needs to center the actor in processes of social transformation.

Solidarity economy-based alternative spaces result from an interface among structural factors, institutional regimes and forms of collective action that mobilise narratives of change, collective identities and non-capitalist economic practices.This book analyses how solidarity economy initiatives develop alternative spatialities as counterpower to mainstream economy. Based on case studies in Europe, Latin America, and Asia, it elaborates on how different scales of solidarity economy-based alternative spaces result from an interface among structural factors, institutional regimes and forms of collective action that mobilise narratives of change, collective identities and non-capitalist economic practices.

Solidarity economy-based alternative spaces result from an interface among structural factors, institutional regimes and forms of collective action that mobilise narratives of change, collective identities and non-capitalist economic practices.This book analyses how solidarity economy initiatives develop alternative spatialities as counterpower to mainstream economy. Based on case studies in Europe, Latin America, and Asia, it elaborates on how different scales of solidarity economy-based alternative spaces result from an interface among structural factors, institutional regimes and forms of collective action that mobilise narratives of change, collective identities and non-capitalist economic practices.

This book addresses marginalization as a form of disempowerment – social, economic, and political exclusion that prevents people from realizing their potential. In response, it explores how organizations can foster empowerment, focusing on Social Business Hybrids (SBHs), which use market-based strategies to activate the economic capabilities of marginalized people. However, such empowerment only succeeds under specific conditions, especially in relation to the environments – or "loci" – where SBHs operate.The book aims to understand both the transformative actions SBHs undertake and the contexts in which these actions occur. Drawing from the Capabilities Approach (Sen, Nussbaum, Kabeer) and Community Psychology (Rappaport), the authors develop a framework integrating two key concepts: The empowering role of organizations and an ecological perspective that considers the relevance of social spaces.They identify two main types of SBH actions: "creation empowerment" and "access empowerment", and two types of empowerment spaces: "safe spaces" and "open spaces for reconnection". These dimensions come together in the proposed SBH Empowering Matrix, which outlines four strategies – safe creation, open creation, safe access, and open access. Each is illustrated through a dedicated case study, providing practical insights into how SBHs can unlock the potential of marginalized people.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

The Italian Cooperative Sector is amongst the largest in the world comprising over 60,000 cooperatives from all sectors of the economy directly employing 1.3 million people. Cooperatives created close to 30 percent of new jobs in Italy between 2001 and 2011 demonstrating that democratic cooperative enterprises can successfully operate in a market economy combining economic success and social responsibility. These offer a viable alternative to profit maximising enterprises and an opportunity to create a more pluralist and democratic market economy.The Growth of Italian Cooperatives: Innovation, Resilience and Social Responsibility comprehensively explains how the Italian cooperative sector has managed to compete successfully in the global economy and to grow during the global financial crisis. This book will comprehensively explain how the Italian cooperative movement has managed to grow into a large successful network of cooperatives. It will examine the legislative framework and their unique business model that allows it to compete in the market as part of a network that includes central cooperative associations, financial and economic consortia, and financial companies. It will explore cooperative entrepreneurship through a discussion of the formation of cooperative groups, start-ups, worker-buyouts and the promotion of entirely new sectors such as the social services sector. Finally, The Growth of Italian Cooperatives examines how cooperatives have managed the GFC and how their behavior differs from private enterprises. It will also analyze the extent to which cooperatives compete while still uphold the key cooperative principles and fulfil their social responsibility. This book is an interdisciplinary study of cooperative development and is designed to inform members of the academic community, government, public policy makers and cooperative managers that are primarily interested in economic democracy, economics of the cooperative enterprise, cooperative networks and economic development, cooperative legislation, democratic governance, job creation programs, politics of inclusion and how wealth can be more equitably distributed.

Social Innovation: Comparative Perspectives investigates socio-economic impact. Since it is hard to establish causality and to measure social properties when investigating impact, especially at the level of society, the book narrows down impact to one priority aspect: social innovation – understood as organizations’ capacity to generate novel ideas, ways and means of doing things, of addressing public and social problems of many kinds.This volume’s primary assertion is that the Third Sector, specifically through stimulating civic involvement, is best placed to produce social innovation, outperforming business firms and state agencies in this regard. By investigating actor contributions to social innovation across seven fields of activity, Social innovation: Comparative Perspectives develops our understanding of why and how the Third Sector is central to functioning, cohesive and viable societies.This volume is based on contributions of the project "ITSSOIN – Impact of the Third Sector as Social Innovation" funded by the European Commission under the 7th framework programme. It will be of insight across disciplines, in particular to the growing social innovation community, innovation researchers more generally and to non-profit scholars. The practical relevance of the book will be of interest to European and national policy makers and practitioners across different sectors.

Although co-design has been practised in new service and product development for some years, it has only recently begun to appear in the burgeoning field of social innovation. It appears to be well-attuned to this new context, offering as it does an open-ended relational process to generate novel solutions to problems whose very definition seems to escape more conventional approaches. However, even less research attention has been paid to co-design than to social innovation.This book explores the potential of co-design as a social innovation process. It reviews the diverse theoretical and disciplinary foundations on which co-design is based. It proposes a framework for understanding co-design as a cohesive practice across the extremely broad scope of its potential applications. It explores appropriate approaches to governance and evaluation of co-design initiatives and outlines the key issues and limitations on its use. Although it is intended to provide a robust theoretical basis for researching co-design initiatives, it will also be of interest to anyone who is contemplating putting co-design into practice.

Social regeneration is about the transformative processes that, through institutional choices that embody cooperation and inclusion, develop opportunities and capabilities for weak categories, and transversally for society. The challenge of social regeneration can be addressed, in part, through organisational solutions increasingly identified with social economy organisations, since they are characterised by a social objective, cooperation and inclusive democratic governance.Besides the organisational element, Social Regeneration and Local Development provides a new perspective on interacting socio-economic factors, which can work in synergy with the social economy organisations model to promote and sustain social regeneration and well-being. Such elements include civic engagement and social capital, the nature of the welfare system, the use of physical assets in urban and rural areas, leadership, technology, and finance.By analysing organisational and contextual elements, this book offers an institutional perspective on how socio-economic systems can reply to challenges such as social and environmental degradation, financial crises, immigration, inequality, and marginalisation.