Details
Year: 2016
Published in: ICSEM Working Papers
Cited as: Anastasiadis, M. & Lang, R. (2016) “Social Enterprise in Austria: A Contextual Approach to Understand an Ambiguous Concept”, No. 26
Subject
Social Enterprise in Austria: A Contextual Approach to Understand an Ambiguous Concept
Abstract
This paper deals with contextual and conceptual issues about the emergence and development of social enterprises in Austria. Social enterprises are understood here as private non- profit- maximising organisations, which reinvest any profit they make in the organisation or distribute it to members (collective appropriation in the case of cooperatives) and/or to society at large. They are further defined as “providing goods or services directly related to their explicit aim to benefit the community. They rely on a collective dynamics involving various types of stakeholders in their governing bodies, they place a high value on their autonomy and they bear economic risks linked to their activity” (Defourny and Nyssens 2008: 5).
