Social enterprise

Summary

A social enterprise is an organization that applies commercial strategies to maximize improvements in financial, social and environmental well-being. This may include maximizing social impact alongside profits for co-owners. Social enterprises can be structured as a business, a partnership for profit or non-profit, and may take the form (depending on in which country the entity exists and the legal forms available) of a co-operative, mutual organisation, a disregarded entity, a social business, a benefit corporation, a community interest company, a company limited by guarantee or a charity organisation. They can also take more conventional structures. Social enterprises have business, environmental and social goals. As a result, their social goals are embedded in their objective, which differentiates them from other organisations and companies. A social enterprise's main purpose is to promote, encourage, and make social change. Social enterprises are businesses created to further a

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_enterprise

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Social Entrepreneurship

James David Thompson

In this dissertation I examine the emergent phenomenon of social entrepreneurship through the lens of the structure of entrepreneurial payoffs under conditions of near-Knightian uncertainty. Current theory assumes entrepreneurs will respond to a new form of incentive, beyond the pursuits of wealth, power, and prestige. It also assumes that productive entrepreneurship can result from a shift in the structure of payoffs. I examine four for-profit social entrepreneurial experiments executed in Southern Africa in order to enhance understanding of the question: "What recurring challenges do for-profit social entrepreneurs face in attempting to restructure payoffs under conditions of near-Knightian uncertainty?" My data are drawn from field observations, company archival records, email communications, and unique targeted interventions designed to solve vexing challenges which arose in the course of the experiments. The dissertation makes several contributions. First, it uncovers several new insights from my findings which should inform future research in for-profit social enterprises. Second, it sheds light on enterprise creation under conditions of near-Knightian uncertainty. Third, it introduces a framework for understanding the challenges faced by nonsingular objective firms, and proposes that lack of success in the creation of such firms is not necessarily failure – there are multiple levels of success that are part of an Aspirations Cascade, the highest efficiency being delivered by the social impact enterprise and the lowest efficiency achieved from direct charity.

EPFL2012

Identity-Society (Mis)Alignment And The Instrumentalization Of Firm Creation: Creative Destruction And Creative Reconstruction

Shirah Eden Foy, Marc Gruber

Research on founder identity has significantly advanced our understanding of entrepreneurship and related literatures. By departing from the widely held-though often implicit-assumption that culture defines the parameters of identity formation, this paper investigates how the alignment, or misalignment, between a founder's identity and their perceived sociocultural context influences new firm creation. We engage in an in-depth qualitative study of 49 founders in Taiwan that reveals how founders' identity structures can be (mis)aligned with their perceived social structures, and how the reinforcement or tensions generated by (mis)alignment can fuel the creation of fundamentally different types of ventures-including those that challenge the perceived sociocultural status quo with a social mission intended to push society toward a new equilibrium. Our theory of founder identity-society (mis)alignment is therefore able to specify a key mechanism linking the founder's identity with perceived sociocultural context. Furthermore, we advance the influential Schumpeterian theory of creative destruction beyond the purely economic context to address the broader sociocultural environment and to incorporate the concept of creative reconstruction, in which entrepreneurs seek to restore elements of society past.

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UECML: Unified Enterprise Competence Modelling Language

Naoufel Cheikhrouhou, Rémy Glardon, Grégoire Pepiot

This paper introduces the principles of a unifiedlanguage devoted to the area of competence-based enterprisemodelling. The language, named UECML, for UnifiedEnterpriseCompetenceModellingLanguage, is intended to provide a neutral interface to enterprisemodelling based on competences. Therefore, it is built on previous languages, especially UnifiedEnterpriseModellingLanguage (UEML) and provides constructs to cover process, resource, competence and enterprise entities. An example of the implementation of the proposed UECML is provided with its application to a producer of railway vehicles.

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