Social Enterprise Recommendations Overview

Policy which aims to empower excluded groups and democratise regeneration through externally stimulating and facilitating social enterprise may in practice most support actors that possess the skills and resources to build discursive legitimacy at the political level. Current policy may therefore do more to reinforce geographies of disadvantage than facilitate social inclusion (Farmer et al. 2012) as well as reinforce existing power relations. The potential for disempowerment, therefore, raises implications for decision makers about how funding programmes are experienced by social enterprise practitioners. The views of community members should be better incorporated into the funding application process, and assumptions cannot be made that actors from outside can adequately represent the needs and aspirations of a community.
Policies which encourage community organisations to become sustainable through market-based activity may end up working at odds with the values held by practitioners in the sector. This study instead suggests that developing relationships and facilitating skills exchange at the community level is crucial. One key lesson, then for policy and practice, is that imposing or insisting upon the ‘social enterprization’ of community projects without the critical backing of the communities in question is unlikely to succeed and, in fact, is far more likely to disempower and disenfranchise people instead.

Further studies should:
1) Explore other sources of social entrepreneurship literature.
2) The level of details covered in each dimension should be complemented by in depth research of each of the topics presented in this study.
3) There are a needs of further studies to better understand characteristics of social entrepreneurs.

1) investigate more explicitly and extensively on how social impact and market revenues are intertwined and reinforce each other. In particular, on the business models, organizational mechanisms, and boundary conditions that can favor social enterprises in achieving and scaling theirsocial impact because and by virtue of their market presence.
2) investigate how hybrid organizations can become purposeful actors fostering social innovation, more sustainable businesses, and inclusive markets.

1) Future studies could generalize the results to different context, culture, and industries;
2) Factors such as time and resource constraints caused the small sample size of the study, which was only 136 respondents in Malaysia from the different districts. In other words, the respondents did not cover all districts in Malaysia.
3) This study applied a cross-sectional design and required a longitudinal study to be validated in the future study of social enterprises;
4) there is a need for further research in comparing these findings with other states or countries, such as cross-cultural research to get a more robust result.

Social enterprise owners are required to improve their capabilities to reach a
higher scale of social innovation for growth and sustainability.

Policy measures must consider the sustainability of these solutions and the support that is required for their continuation.
Most notably, funding and skills enhancement support is required to ease the stress on volunteers and staff members in the daily running of social enterprises. Approaches to tackling social isolation and loneliness cannot be a ‘one size fits all’, and policy must accommodate local level complexities and contextual differences, such as low workforce pools and declining populations. In particular, the capacity for rural communities to provide alternative services that may have been withdrawn by the state, such as public transport, should be considered.

“1) Further research is required to explore social isolation and loneliness in other international rural contexts to verify presented findings and test identified pathways in which rural social enterprise enhance health and wellbeing as a result of decreasing rural isolation and loneliness. Such information is required to inform future policy on social isolation and loneliness.
2) Social isolation and
loneliness is presented as one example of how social enterprise activity
is impacting on the health and wellbeing of rural communities. Further academic research would benefit from an exploration of aspects of mental and physical health that social enterprise activity may address in rural contexts, such as depression or mobility.”