Social Cooperatives - A new social economy light in Croatia

This paper is positioned at TOPIC 20-STAGE 2 –MACRO. According to four stages of development of social enterprise (Salvatori, 2013; Galera, 2015), in Croatia sector is on second stage – progressive emergence. One of the... [ view full abstract ]

This paper is positioned at TOPIC 20-STAGE 2 –MACRO.
According to four stages of development of social enterprise (Salvatori, 2013; Galera, 2015), in Croatia sector is on second stage – progressive emergence. One of the main actor in this progressiveness are social cooperatives – a new player in the field from 2011 when they were for the first time integrated in Law on Cooperatives. Besides long cooperative tradition in Croatia, after political transition period in ‘90s, basically whole sector had to initiate new paths of development and social cooperatives are last mark on these paths.
The paper that we want to present at ICA 2016 Conference is based on research work within our project iPRESENT - Installation Project for REsearch about Social ENTrepreneurship which is funded by Croatian Science Foundation.
First goal of project was to carry out mapping of social economy actors in Croatia after which in 2014 we came to 90 legal entities. From that number we derived 20 social cooperatives and we will present main data about their economic performances, human resources level of and institutional support.
Likewise it is important to analyse position of social cooperatives in newly passed (April, 2015) Strategy for the Development of Social Entrepreneurship in the Republic of Croatia for the period of 2015 – 2020.
Final part of presentation will be saved for recently obtained data about satisfaction with working conditions in Croatian social cooperatives and eventual presence of workers intrinsic values. The data is gathered through focus group interviews that will be analysed via qualitative data analysis software (Atlas ti.). This will enable us to describe the value orientation of social economy employees, and their job/work preferences, which in turn will shed some light on both past and future development paths.