Model of Social Enterprises in Spain: an update

In Spain, the term "social enterprise" is a new concept that has emerged not many years ago. It arrives in Spain from the new politics of European Union and is being used by organizations with an Anglo-Saxon background like... [ view full abstract ]

In Spain, the term "social enterprise" is a new concept that has emerged not many years ago. It arrives in Spain from the new politics of European Union and is being used by organizations with an Anglo-Saxon background like some Business Schools located in Spain. The term “social enterprises” was firstly used to those organizations which began to make labor for social and labor integration and other social activities from early-eighties. Later, the social economy sector has slowly introduced this term to name their entities in order to obtain their recognition, and is pushing to be generally accepted social enterprise’s behavior must be based on the principles and values of social economy.
Related to this debate about the concept and origin of the Social Enterprise in Spain, this paper proposes models of social enterprise in Spain emerging from the grassroots. For this, we look for models of these organizations in the economic sector where we understand typically these firms are presented. Added to the traditional sector of Work-social integration, in which social enterprises began as we said, we include social services, education, health and rural development as those were social enterprises could be established according to the tradition of social economy sector and the services related to non-profit organizations’ activities. Finally, other sector as culture, international cooperation, financial intermediation and environment are relatively recent for social enterprise and are niche of innovative practices that can be related to the activities of the characteristics of social enterprises.
In these sectors we find 18 models of social enterprises, which are characterized using the nine elements of ideal social enterprise model proposed by EMES (Defourny and Nyssens, 2013), added other three elements that we understand are useful to define models of social enterprises (financing model, social transformation mission, and membership of networks). After this analysis, we represent by cobweb graphs the characteristics of these models and conclude with three big models of social enterprises (traditional, intermediate and emerging sectors). Also, we propose a restricted analysis of social enterprise’s models using a more controlled analysis, just grouping the twelve elements of the EMES compass in the three big categories: economic, social and governance variables. We found 5 big fields of social enterprises in Spain.