Social enterprise is a concept which has different definitions across countries and regions (Defourny and Nyssens, 2006; Kerlin, 2009). The boundaries of the concept are still blurred (Galera and Borzaga, 2009; Doherty et al.,... [ view full abstract ]
Social enterprise is a concept which has different definitions across countries and regions (Defourny and Nyssens, 2006; Kerlin, 2009). The boundaries of the concept are still blurred (Galera and Borzaga, 2009; Doherty et al., 2014), but its core principles are well defined: the adoption of some form of commercial activity to generate revenue, and the pursuit of social goals (Laville and Nyssens, 2001; Doherty et al., 2014). In order to better understand the typology and the factors that explain the emergence of social enterprise, work has been done in recent years drawing from different theories and perspectives (see Haugh, 2012).
Given that social enterprise lies within boundaries of the private, public and non-profit sectors (Defourny and Nyssens, 2010; Doherty et al., 2014), the analysis of social enterprise from an institutional theory framework (DiMaggio, 1988) can help to better understand the relationship of these organizational forms within a socioeconomic context and within the institutions they interact with (Kerlin, 2010).
Country-level institutional factors explain in part the emergence and typology of social enterprise (Borzaga and Defourny, 2001; Austin et al., 2006) because such enterprises face pressure from diverse (Cooney, 2006) and sometimes conflicting (Pache and Santos, 2012) institutional demands. Such explanations gain importance in light of the fact that different forms of social enterprise are not strictly regionally separated (Young and Lecy, 2013), but can reveal a diversity of approaches in neighboring countries or even inside the same country (Sepulveda, 2009; Evers et al., 2014).
Kerlin (2013) in a recent work draws on historical institutionalism to examine how institutional contexts influence the development of social enterprises across different countries. She constructs a conceptual framework that helps to explain how institutional processes shape social enterprise in different contexts and help develop a typology of social enterprises.
Responding to the need to compare social enterprise across dimensions of place and form (Austin et al., 2006; Doherty et al., 2014), the general objective of this article is to apply the Kerlin framework (2013) in the case of Spain in two different dimensions:
- At the national level, analyzing the historical institutional context of Spain in the last 40 years with the aim of suggesting a national model for social enterprise.
- At the regional level, exploring if the diverse contexts that exist in the 17 Autonomous Communities that form Spain can yield to differences in the formation of social enterprises.
This article is intended to contribute to the field of social enterprise by broadening the understanding of the growth and development processes of social enterprises into two aspects.
First, it helps to validate from a historical institutionalism perspective, aspects of the Kerlin framework for social enterprise models. Traits of Spain’s social enterprise that can be explained by the evolution of its institutional context occurred over the last 40 years. Social enterprise is a dynamic concept and changes according to institutional conditions (social, cultural, political, economic) also bring about changes in the model of social enterprise prevalent in a country.
Second, the Spanish case shows that the analysis of regional differences in the context should be taken into consideration when examining a country's social enterprise space. The analysis explores the importance of the regional context when considering social enterprise models. Specific cultural, political and economic regional conditions can explain the emergence and different stages of development of social-driven organization in some regions. In Spain we observe two regions that present higher prevalence of social enterprises and social economy organizations: Catalonia and the Basque country. We suggest that these differences can be partly explained by the institutional context of these regions.
