Details
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.
Abstract
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.
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Recommendations from this resource
Policy Makers
In Greece, there should be a move of the social enterprise portfolio to the Ministry of Development, creation of social enterprise stakeholder feedback groups and networks that aim to deal explicitly with issues of community trust, and co-funding initiatives from the Greek Government and EU Structural Funds, could potentially promote the development of a resilient and productive social enterprise ecosystem.
Future Research
1) Future research may extend and develop this approach through a focus on other regions suffering from crisis, be they economic, social, environmental or combined.
