Since the 1970s, and the return of liberal-type economic policies, interest in social and/or solidarity economy has increased worldwide. In Chile, these debates appeared briefly at the turn of the 1990s, after the resettlement of democracy. However, they remain relatively isolated and quashed by dominant neoliberal model, growing inequality and individualistic culture (de la Maza, 2002, PNUD, 2015). Rebirth of interest for social economy arose after the years 2010, together with the renewed attention paid to the topics of inclusion and equity, especially promoted by social movement locally and globally (Stoessel 2014; Pleyers & Capitaine, 2016). So, the characterization of social economy in Chile and its transformations in an historical perspective is important to understand the main purposes of the sector (in terms of social equity, economic democracy, environmental sustainability or even the classic principles of commensality and reciprocity).
In this article, we propose to contribute to a characterization of social and solidarity economy sector in Chile through a qualitative secondary data analysis. The text focuses first in the methodological approach we designed, that we believe is replicable and useful in context of scarce resources. Secondly the text addresses some of the main findings that allow portraying social economy and his internal tensions in a highly neoliberal country such as Chile.
The results show that (1) social economy sector in Chile revolves around a set of permanent and transversal economic issues that have been relevant for the well-being of producers, workers, and economic communities, and (2) that these main economic issues find diverse institutional responses.
The permanent economic issues can be summarized in four ones:
(1) The desire to build a labour based economy, capable to counteract the alienating tendencies of the neoliberal capitalist labour organization. This involves re-appropriating of the process, product and surplus of their work. These issues have been addressed by institutional arrangements that range from producer cooperatives to fair trade certificates.
(2) Social security, coverage and support in relation to incidents such as illness and labour incapacity. This need was particularly important in the 19th century mutual organization, but they have diminished in relevance, and been displaced by private insurance services.
(3) The management of common goods, which is an economic and political problem for communities, that needs to be addressed through governance processes. This has been addressed by producer association such as gremial organizations and trade unions.
(4) Expressive dimensions and public representation of their interests and visibility of their demands.
In order to address these permanent problems, the organizations of the social economy sector have emphasized different logics, moving between State-centred answers, which favour centralizing and redistributive processes as is the case for large cooperatives; Market-centred answers, favouring private action and price formation, such as ethical certification processes; and finally, Society-centred answers that emphasize the ideas of autonomy, mutualism, social purpose and self-management as small cooperatives.
This overlapping of logics, combined with the increasing in size, scope and standardization of organizations and procedures, open-up a cross-cutting issue: that of the tension between “formal” (or “formalized”) and “substantial” social economy. In this sense, it’s seems difficult to define an unambiguous demarcation criterion to constrict the perimeter of social economy (Defourny, 1994; Ministerio de Economía , Fomento y Turismo, 2015; González y Donovan, 2005; Laville, 2009), and, therefore, it’s necessary to move toward a multi-criterion approach that allows to set up a scale to define whether they belong to the sector.
Bibliography
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1. Concepts and models of social enterprise worldwide
