This paper constitutes an input from the Brazilian team to the ICSEM Project, a broad research project whose main purpose is to compare social enterprise models and their respective institutionalisation processes across the world. The ICSEM Project relies on the participation of a large number of researchers from all regions, who contribute by providing country-specific or field-specific analysis of social enterprise models. The field of analysis is delineated as made of organisations that combine an entrepreneurial dynamics to provide services or goods with the primacy of their social aims. This definition stresses specific governance models, often found in social enterprises, rather than the profile of social entrepreneurs. A democratic control or a participatory involvement of stakeholders and citizens reflects a quest for more economic democracy inside the organisation, in the line of the tradition of cooperatives and, more recently, of the Solidarity Economy and other forms of social enterprises that have been spreading in Latin America and Brazil.
The goal of this paper is to present a proposal for the conceptualisation and typology of social enterprises and similar organisations, using previous empirical research and conceptual studies carried out over the last years by the authors. To better contextualise the typology in the setting of social and economic organisations different from private or public companies, some conceptual issues related to the Social Economy and to the Third Sector will be preliminary discussed. The focus of the following sections will be the current layout of empreendimentos econômicos solidários (solidarity economy enterprises), as well as enterprises from third sector and new initiatives linked to the creative economy and created by citizens. The main observational support for this study are the data coming from the second National Mapping of Solidarity Economy, the analysis of which will enable, throughout the paper, to establish a retrospective notion of the experiences of solidarity economy in the country and distinguish its main current expressions. In addition, the paper will discuss some themes which are very specific of the Brazilian solidarity economy enterprises, also typical of the South reality, such as: (i) the entrepreneurship of the excluded people, who are also the beneficiaries, fact that redefines the meaning of the social missing and the economic distribution; (ii) the strong political dimension of the enterprises: internal (throw self-management) and external (the role in community and society), and (iii) the sense and the role of the informality.
The paper concludes with general considerations that include theoretical issues publicised by the ICSEM Project. It will be argued that the realities of the South would be misunderstood without the distinction between the logic of domesticity, essential to the family and community-based economy that sustains countless solidarity enterprises, and that of reciprocity. This unquestionably important heuristic reference could then complementarily assemble the four principles of economic action conceived by Karl Polanyi.
1. Concepts and models of social enterprise worldwide
