Fundamentals for an International Typology of Social Enterprise Models

Year: 2016
Published in: ICSEM Working Papers
Cited as: Defourny, J. & Nyssens, M. (2016) “Fundamentals for an International Typology of Social Enterprise Models“, No. 33.

Fundamentals for an International Typology of Social Enterprise Models

We do argue here that the SE field will benefit much more in the future from linking conceptualization efforts to the huge diversity of social enterprises and forms of social entrepreneurship than from an additional and ambitious attempt at providing an encompassing definition. This is not to say that field realities were not carefully observed nor analyzed so far. On the contrary, a great deal of conceptual and theoretical works have been illustrated by examples of social enterprises and widely taught—all the more so as “cases” represent a key teaching strategy in business schools. Nevertheless, case studies do not bring much evidence about the relevance of definitions: they are precisely selected to illustrate the latter and they do not say much about all the other field realities that do not fall under the same umbrella. So, generally speaking, it can be stated that very few conceptual constructions were “tested” against or derived from wide empirical evidence. Our point of view is that the arena of conceptualization efforts should now be fed with more contributions starting from solid empirical works. From such standpoint, bottom-up approaches could first be built upon a hypothesis that could be termed “the impossibility of a unified definition”. This being accepted, it then becomes feasible, in a more humble perspective, to deal with this huge diversity by trying to achieve groupings or categories of social enterprises on various grounds.