Context
The notion of social enterprise is commonly used to qualify all entrepreneurial initiatives that serve a social and/or environmental mission and that reinvest a large part of their surpluses in support of their mission. Although this definition is not yet stabilised and its boundaries remain unclear, it has gained interest from scholars, politicians, international organisations and practitioners, although with different agendas. Interest is also growing also because it has become an important economic reality on a large scale that provide new responses to societal challenges within the context of economic crisis and of the uncertainty of the future of welfare states. Within this context, all sorts of initiatives that answer new social needs, are often described as social enterprises. Such a diversity of uses calls for a conceptual clarification. Although the EMES European Research Network proposed since the mid-1990’s an ideal-type for social enterprise, it does not solve all the debates. The ICSEM international comparative project on social enterprise models follows the same objective of clarification and better understanding of their characteristics.
Purpose
Within the frame of the ICSEM project, our proposition is aimed at contributing to the mapping of social enterprises in the French context, presenting how the notion of “social enterprise” is understood and developed in France. Our guiding hypothesis is that the social enterprise in France, is little discussed in relation to other national contexts. This paper adopts an historical perspective to better understand why social enterprise is not yet a largely used notion and how it interacts with other socio-economic practices, such as social economy or solidarity economy that are now well recognised in France. From this perspective, social enterprise does not correspond to a stabilised approach and takes different forms, which situate it between three poles: the social economy, the solidarity economy and social entrepreneurship.
In the first part, we briefly review the history of these socio-economic practices, identifying the modalities of their different phases of institutionalisation.
In the second part we consider the frontiers and continuities manifested by the social enterprise, situated in relation to the three poles mentioned. Our analysis shows that, in a context of intense transformation of the modes of regulation and more generally of contemporary capitalism, the links between social enterprise, the social economy, the solidarity economy and social entrepreneurship appear more or less stretched. We identify four dimensions where the question of continuity or rupture between these approaches arises. They concern the place of the entrepreneur; the reference to the market and enterprise; governance and internal democracy; and the project.
On the basis of this inquiry, three models of the social enterprise in contemporary France are extracted in the third part, crystallising tendencies that the research identifies as important. The first can be seen as an extension of the social economy and manifests the diversification of the statutes within it, the second corresponds to a reflection conducted within the associative movement articulated with a theory of the solidarity economy, and the third emphasises social entrepreneurship.
Our analysis led to the recognition of an entrepreneurial continuum between social enterprise, social economy, solidarity economy and social entrepreneurship but also suggested some points of rupture between these different approaches. It also stressed that boundaries are not settled yet in France. In order to go on with this debate, our work shows the importance to recognise the plurality of economic principles and to reintegrate the public or political dimension of these socio-economic practices, as part of the public space, in the sense that they take part to the definition of public issues.
