In order to sketch out the historical, contextual and conceptual issues related to the emergence of social enterprise in Denmark our analysis point to the following issues. Denmark is a special case in the European and international environment of social entrepreneurship and social enterprises. His- torically, Denmark was situated very strong in the first socio-economic wave that hit the world from the mid-1800s onwards. The second social-economic wave emerged internationally departing from the voluntary sector from the mid-1980s onwards. In Denmark a high level of project organization emerged at the expense of organizational and business development, while Denmark were more slowly to move into the third social-economic wave, that focused on the development of coherent strategies and policies. A hundred years back we can identify a distinctly innovative period in which the first social economic wave washed over Denmark with unprecedented force leading to Denmark in a short period of time is able to position itself internationally developing a very strong coopera- tive sector. Social enterprises and social entrepreneurship in Denmark are rooted in the recent Euro- pean economic and social history where cooperative enterprises (including cooperatives) constitute a historical basis for modern social enterprises (Hulgård & Andersen, 2009). The cooperative movement in Denmark consisted of a number of rural located cooperative movements and the for- mal cooperative organisation and this movement overall was the "strong first voluntary cooperative movement in the world" (Svendsen and Svendsen, 2004: 1). At the same time, Svendsen and Svendsen show that the main reason for this success was the cooperative sector's success in ‘pro- ducing’ a production factor that is often overlooked in economic analyzes: social capital. The sig- nificant weaving of the local cooperative movements and the central cooperative organisation pro- vides the strength of this economic development whose characteristics are the interweaving of so- cial and economic criteria (Svendsen and Svendsen, 2004: 86).
The second social economic wave arises from the early 1980s, where a number of crit- ical voiced from both right and left sides of the political spectrum criticized the fully developed welfare state (Hegland and Hulgård, 1998). Up through the 1970s the welfare state developed artic- ulating a number of problems, which ultimately had the potential of threating the very survival of the welfare state. Very briefly, one could identify the following three interrelated crisis phenomena (Hegland, 1992, Hegland and Hulgård, 1998): 1/ A resource crisis manifested by a very rapidly ris- ing demand pressures for public-yearly repayments that it was about to shake the economy. The demand for health services, education and public spending were observed at this time to be almost unlimited. 2/ A functional crisis manifested by the welfare state services gradually developing into stiffen-in rigid structures and routines that seemed to "live their own lives." The standardized, func- tional and organizational forms of the welfare state were no longer fully able to peace the popula- tion's nuanced needs in a rapidly changing society. 3/ A crisis of legitimacy, which could be identi- fied in a decline of the amount of the popular and public solidarity, which had previously worn the welfare state forward. The generations of Danes that had seen and actually experienced a society without a well-developed social safety net were dying out and thereby feather the direct, historical memory that in the beginning served as a strong basis of a social solidarity. Furhermore, the welfare state construction meant that the social solidarity, which nevertheless still was present in the Danish population was anonymously disseminated through tax-ticket and left to professional social workers to exercise in practice
The third social economic wave has hit the world since the late 1990s, and was almost heralded by Charles Leadbeater's book "The Rise of the Social Entrepreneur" from 1997. The third social economic wave was characterized by the fact that all three types of SE (social economy, so- cial entrepreneurship and social enterprise) was the subject of great attention of all agents both na- tionally and globally.
