In Brazil, during the last fifteen years, new tendencies related to organizational forms combining market-related activities and social mission have emerged countrywide. Following the same “social enterprise” and “social business” wave that has been growing internationally, combined with constant political and socio-economic changes occurred in Brazil, innovative social solutions have been created by entrepreneurs and groups of citizens from civil society, third sector, public and business sectors.
Such initiatives include non-profit organizations creating, managing and expanding mission-based and market-related economic activities to ensure financial sustainability, as well as a new generation of for-profit enterprises designed to fulfill a social mission. Many of those are crafted by young and newly graduate entrepreneurs, a force towards social impact that is fostering and accelerating the social entrepreneurship movement in the country. Combined to associations, cooperatives and informal organizations linked to the well-established field of the Brazilian solidarity economy, as well as to some social-oriented projects promoted by institutes, foundations and traditional enterprises, this recent generation of organizations gave rise to a new field of social enterprises in Brazil called “negócios de impacto social” (social impact enterprises).
Although very recent, this field has already started to be explored by academic research and publications, supporting institutions and mapping initiatives. Such scenario opens many opportunities of transversal analysis aiming to foster a deeper understanding of how social impact is achieved by these organizations, but yet fairly investigated. By combining this accumulated knowledge to empirical data collected with Brazilian social impact enterprises, this paper aims to explore how these organizations generate social impact, identifying the models by which they achieve social impact thought economic activities.
Social impact enterprises operate social-impact-oriented-activities that are embedded in a dynamic competitive market and, at the same time, in non-market redistribution and reciprocity logics. That means that they sell services and products, manage governmental relationships and coordinate exchanges that follows social norms based on the relationship of giving and mobilizing resources from civil society. And many of them stand out for their ability to combine these three principles of economic behavior, subordinating the market and redistribution logics to the logic of reciprocity, where the social purpose overdetermines the economic purpose.
It seems that the models on which such organizations base their activities are sustained by a set of three pillars which are those of competitiveness, legitimacy and solidarity. Solidarity becomes an integrating concept that serves as a reference for generating social impact mobilizing market and governmental activities. It incorporates reciprocity directly to the mission of the organization as an "end in itself", that is, the ultimate reason to exist, allowing to manage the alignment with the two other pillars.
By therefore exploring the particularities of these three pillars in Brazilian social impact enterprises, this study seeks to contribute to the understanding of how social impact is being achieved by organizations in this country. At the same time that some of these initiatives are in fact creative and sustainable towards social impact, others have yet much to grow and develop.
The results of this paper’s analysis also seem to be coherent with a previous exploration of social and collective enterprises in Québec, where the three pillars helped to explain and understand how they innovate both economically and socially, bringing new solutions to social needs and aspirations, articulating both social transformation and economic sustainability and combining different sources of resources. Such comparison opens the opportunity to explore further other similarities and differences between social enterprise models in different countries.
Main references
BARKI, E.; IZZO, D.; TORRES, H.; AGUIAR, L.. (Org.). Negócios com Impacto Social no Brasil. São Paulo: Peirópolis, 2013.
COMINI, G. Negócios Sociais e Inovação Social: Um retrato de experiências brasileiras. Tese (Livre-docência), São Paulo: Universidade de São Paulo. 2016. 166 p.
COMINI, G.; BARKI, E.; AGUIAR, L. A three-pronged approach to social business: a Brazilian multi-case analysis. Revista de Administração da USP, São Paulo, v. 47, n. 3, p. 385-397, jul./set. 2012.
DEFOURNY, Jacques; NYSSENS, Marthe (Coords.) The “International Comparative Social Enterprise Models (ICSEM) Project. Liège / Bruxelles. 2013.
FERRARINI, A.; GAIGER, L.; VERONESE, M. Solidarity economy enterprises in Brazil: an overview from the second national mapping. The “International Comparative Social Enterprise Models (ICSEM) Project. Liège / Bruxelles. 2016.
FISCHER, R. M.; COMINI G. Sustainable development: from responsibility to entrepreneurship. Revista de Administração da USP, São Paulo, v. 47, n. 3, p. 363-369, jul./set. 2012.
SANTANA, A. L. J. M.; SOUZA, L. M. Empreendedorismo com foco em negócios sociais. Curitiba: NITS UFPR, 2015. 172 p.
1. Concepts and models of social enterprise worldwide
170605_SocialImpactEnterprisesBrazil_PCF.pdf 