“Social enterprise is a contested and fluid concept constructed by different actors promoting different discourses connected to different organisational forms and drawing upon different academic theories” (Teasdale, 2012:99). The concept of social enterprise is contested because the term differs from Adam Smith’s (1776) view on the inherent conflict between pursuing profit and serving a social objective simultaneously (Dees and Anderson, 2003). It is fluid because different scholars and practitioners use this term to refer to a wide variety of organisational types and practices (Teasdale, 2012), which are, though not new (Simmons, 2008), evolving from earlier forms of non-profit, co-operative and mainstream business (Defourny and Nyssens, 2010).
Additionally, there are significant geographical differences in what the term means, and how it is supported and developed (Kerlin, 2010). For example, “social enterprise” in the United States is used as a “verb”, referring to revenue generation activities undertaken by non-profit organisations (Dees, 1998), whereas in Europe (mostly in Western Europe), the term is used as a “noun”, focusing on a range of organisational forms that share common traits such as profit making, social mission, and/or democratic governance (EMES European Research Network, 1997, 1998, 1999). Diverse interpretations of this term have caused problematic conceptualisation (Simmons, 2008) and thus lead to no universally accepted definition of social enterprise (The European Commission, 2007) or sometimes to definitions too vague and (Young, 2012).
The only definite characteristics across all interpretations are the primacy of social aims and the employment of trading activities (Peattie and Morley, 2008). Therefore, apart from the literature that has focused on defining social enterprise and adapting theories to explain its emergence (Teasdale, 2012) scholars have been working on thoughtful typologies of social enterprise by utilising these two characteristics (Young, 2012). Some authors locate social enterprise in a wide spectrum or continuum, such as Alter’s (2007) spectrum ranging from traditional non-profit to conventional for-profit and Nicholls’ (2006) continuum from grant-dependent voluntary activism to self-sufficient corporate social innovation; others categorise social enterprises according to various dimensions such as Teasdale’s (2010) two-dimension classification by governance (collective vs. individualistic) and primary purpose (commercial vs. social).
However, there is a tendency for scholars to seek a homogeneous definition of social enterprise by describing particular characteristics (Peattie and Morley, 2008), which enforces arbitrary judgements of which organisations should be included or excluded by the term (Young and Lecy, 2014). In these typologies, scholars consider social enterprises from only one or two aspects and merely highlight the essential idea of social enterprise (Young and Lecy, 2014), i.e. the tension between social purpose and commercial success (Oster et al., 2004; Mozier and Tracey, 2010; Young, 2012). Without introducing more dimensions and to underlining the complexity of social enterprise these typologies are not able to achieve an enhanced classification.
Recognising the profound problem in defining social enterprise and the limitation of typologies, this paper argues that the scope of social enterprise is much wider and that the extant definitions and typologies are far from comprehensive. In the first section, the paper examines the conceptualisations, typologies and the comparative studies on social enterprise and extracts three common aspects of concern: governance, financial resources and the relevance of business to the social mission. In the second section, a consequent multi-dimension framework is developed, which contains six types of social enterprise. This proposed framework offers a more sophisticated classification, which not only categorises social enterprises according to the organisational form, but also sheds light on the process by emphasising the relationship between business and social missions. More importantly, this framework recognises the heterogeneity of social enterprise.
Conceptualisation_of_Social_Enterprise-A_tri-dimensional_typology_framework_5th_EMES.pdf 