Social enterprise and community resilience: Examining a Greek response to turbulent times

Year: 2019
Published in: Journal of Rural Studies, Volume 70, August 2019, Pages 215-224
Cited as: Apostolopoulos, Nikolaos, Robert Newbery, and Menelaos Gkartzios. “Social enterprise and community resilience: Examining a Greek response to turbulent times.” Journal of Rural studies 70 (2019): 215-224.

Using community resilience and institutional entrepreneurship as conceptual lens, the paper explores whether support for social enterprises in non-metropolitan Greece has led to resilient social systems. Whilst drawing on narratives of enabling a bottom-up response to market failure, rather than radical or reformist adaptation, social enterprise may have produced a reluctant and state reliant response which may weaken the resilience of communities to survive continued austerity. The research selected and interviewed 30 social enterprises operating within non-metropolitan Greece during 2016. It contributes to knowledge through a novel framing, which clarifies that social enterprise in Greece remains a top-down governance process which fails to deliver transformative forms of community resilience.