This report summarises the findings of the project 'Benchmarking the socio-economic performance of the EU social economy'. Across the 27 Member States, the social economy includes more than 4.3 million entities1. Social economy entities are mainly cooperatives, mutual benefit societies,...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze the evolution of the social enterprise concept at an international level. It provides a comprehensive overview of the existing literature in this subject area and focuses on the legal implementation of social enterprises....

Institutional and organizational variety is increasingly characterising advanced economic systems. While traditional economic theories have focussed almost exclusively on profit-maximizing (i.e. for-profit) enterprises and on publicly-owned organizations, the increasing relevance of non-profit...

he role of cooperative and social enterprises in contemporary market economies has been downplayed and marginalised to date by the dominant economic approaches. This insufficient attention (Kalmi, 2008 su Cambridge Journal of Economics) derives from the limited applicability of the main...