Search Results

Traditional service delivery for homeless youths consists of residential as well as outreach and shelter services. Although traditional services aim to mitigate the health, mental health, and social problems of homeless youths, this approach fails to replace their street-survival behaviors with other legal, income-generating activities. Due to its focus on meeting these youths’ basic needs, traditional service provision reflects the remedial or maintenance-consumption approach to social work. In the case of homeless youths, successful strategies to move them from the informal to the formal economy require more than employment in low-paying positions, since their formal labor-market participation is often hindered by the challenges inherent in living on the streets. This chapter describes existing social investment strategies for homeless youths and suggests that through social enterprises, these youths can acquire vocational and business skills, mentorship, clinical treatment, and linkages to services to facilitate their economic and social self-sufficiency.

This chapter considers the pathways to becoming an artistic social entrepreneur. Previous research on social entrepreneurs has emphasized the impact of one's stock of human, social, and cultural capital on one's mobilization of requisite resources for launching and sustaining a social enterprise. Less sociological attention has been given to the influence of career-biographical factors, such as family, religion, education, and pivotal career turning points that may inspire and compel one to become a social entrepreneur and to envision and shape one's social enterprise, let alone an artistic social enterprise. The profiles of four artistic social entrepreneurs in this chapter illustrate how their strategic and risk orientations and career pathways shape the social enterprises they envision and influence their assumption and enactment of their roles as artist activists.

This chapter applies the nine conditions for empowerment introduced in Chapter 4 to employment. Employment is empowering because it affords people a range of consumer and lifestyle choices, it increases financial independence, it has interpersonal and social benefits, and it plays an important role in the recovery process of many people with mental illness. Employment incentives and disincentives are explored, including those found under SSI and SSDI. The chapter also discusses structures to promote employment, including supported employment, transitional employment positions, consumer businesses and self-employment, social enterprises, sheltered workshops, and volunteer work. Case studies from a state psychiatric hospital and a community mental health illustrate the application of conditions. The chapter concludes with fourteen guidelines to promote empowerment through employment.

This chapter first provides a background understanding of firms as participating in “production metamarkets” that serve widespread and usually global “consumption markets.” It then presents a menu of legal forms of private firms, including corporations, partnerships, and limited liability companies, as well as state-owned enterprises. The choice of legal forms creates many variations on the traditional “black box” of the firm along the primary dimensions of agency authority and property ownership. The names used for different enterprises are described, ranging from sole proprietorships to complex relational firms. Basic principles of organizational law distinguish business firms from other kinds of social entities, including political governments and nonprofit organizations. The chapter outlines the importance of these distinctions and provides an overview of the main choices of legal forms available to business participants, entrepreneurs, and other enterprise-organizers. New hybrid social enterprises, such as benefit or “B” corporations, are covered as well.

With the resources of both governments and traditional philanthropy barely growing or in decline, yet the problems of poverty, ill-health and environmental degradation ballooning daily, it is increasingly clear that new models for financing and promoting social and environmental objectives have become urgently needed. Fortunately, a significant revolution appears to be underway on the frontiers of philanthropy that is providing at least a partial, though still embryonic, response to this dilemma. The heart of this revolution is a massive explosion in the instruments and institutions being deployed to mobilize private resources, and particularly private investment capital, in support of social and environmental objectives. This chapter provides a broad overview of these new actors and tools, identifies the factors giving rise to them, examines the major barriers impeding their full development, and outlines a set of steps needed to improve their effectiveness and extend their reach.

Social enterprises are hybrid organizations that combine business and charity at their core. This chapter argues that hybrid organizing, the activities, structures, processes, and meanings by which social enterprises make sense of and combine business and charity at their core, deserves more scholarly attention. Are social enterprises sustainable, and if so, how can they achieve high levels of both social and economic performance? Understanding how social enterprises can be successful has implications for organizations beyond social enterprises, as an increasing proportion of corporations try to integrate corporate social responsibility activities into their strategy. In closing, it is argued that hybrid organizing has the potential to reshape capitalism through the creation of organizations that pursue both social and economic objectives, and are held accountable for doing so.

This chapter describes the rise of a challenger organization, called NPower, that took advantage of transformations in the Circuit Rider social movement to rise in prominence. NPower combined some of the Circuit Riders’ social values with market values of technology entrepreneurs into a hybrid organizational form: the social enterprise. The result attracted funding from for-profit companies such as Microsoft as well as other large for-profit technology firms. Materially, these resources allowed NPower to grow rapidly and eventually gain national prominence. Symbolically, the support of for-profit firms provided a different basis for moral legitimacy in the nonprofit technology assistance field, moving the account of worth away from the larger social good and into more narrowly defined economic goods, such as efficiency gains.

This chapter focuses on enterprise and care considering the contribution that new delivery models such as social enterprises make within public services more broadly and care in particular. The chapter also considers the ambiguity of the social enterprise label and its capacity to be claimed by a range of governance types, including the for-profit as well as the not-for-profit. The chapter then draws together the evidence on micro-enterprises into four research hypotheses that are tested in later chapters of the book, through qualitative and quantitative research. These are derived from the policy claims that are made by proponents of micro forms of service delivery: that micro-enterprises are more personalised, innovative, cost-effective and outcomes-oriented than larger organisations.

This chapter focuses on VCSOs, which it is claimed are tending to become more like state agencies as a result of taking on the delivery of service under government contracts. It explains that VCSOs resemble private sector enterprises in response to an increasingly competitive environment for resources. It notes that the notion of social enterprise ‘draws on the exceptional effort of individuals and organisations working in the most testing circumstances to meet social needs and empower communities’. It clarifies that ‘social enterprise’ is a term that can be applied to charities and voluntary groups that adopt income-generating strategies, including public sector contracts, although such organisations often do not recognise themselves as being enterprises or entrepreneurial.

This chapter investigates the role of civil society and social capital in the formal development of the third sector worldwide. It starts with a brief overview of civil society and social capital and goes on to consider how civil society works as a dynamic force within the entirety of a political and social experience. It then discusses organizations as integrative mechanisms in social life, with particular emphasis on how associational life and civil society are intertwined with themes of social integration, social capital, and generalized trust. It also examines the institutionalization of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the growth of the third sector in the 1980s and 1990s; the question of effectiveness and evaluation in civil society organizations, especially in the United States; and the tension that arises between the logic of professionalization and other institutional logics such as activism. Finally, the chapter looks at social enterprise as an alternative to the traditional format of the NGO.

The concluding chapter examines the nature of professional practice as it has matured over the last 20 years. The chapter shows in detail how design evolved from the shaping of objects to become an essential part of the strategies of some of the world’s most influential companies and organizations. We examine the contributions to this process of labs such as the Interval Research Corporation, the established consultancies and their second- and third-generation successors, companies ranging from Apple and Adobe to Google and Facebook, and in the context of specific category-defining products including the Amazon Kindle, the Nest Learning Thermostat, and the Tesla Model S. The chapter concludes with a review of the extension of design practice into the realm of social enterprise and the application of design methodologies to issues of poverty, health, and civil rights.

The introductory chapter outlines some of the major social changes (e.g. in demography, employment and labour markets) which pose significant challenges to established social welfare systems. It discusses how and why social innovation has emerged and been promoted as a response to these challenges. The chapter clarifies the meaning of social innovation by considering how it has been defined, and explains how it relates to innovation in technology and business, and how it differs from social enterprise. Examples of social innovations are provided which illustrate the wide range of activities and diverse forms they take. A typology is provided to classify these variants. The nature of innovation within public organisations is discussed (i.e. intrepreneurialism). The chapter concludes by setting out some of the questions which should be asked of social innovation in relation to social and public policy reform.

This chapter focuses on the crucial demand side of the emerging social-impact investment market, the issue of “deal flow,” or limited availability of social-purpose organizations of various types with the scale and sophistication to access complex social-impact investment resources either on their own or with the assistance of a variety of intermediaries. The chapter outlines the structure and dynamics of the demand side of the social-impact investment market, critiques some of the recent attempts to assess demand, suggests how to quantify the scope and trajectories of this side of the market, and reflects on key issues and barriers going forward.

This chapter explores social finance in terms of the types of investee enterprise. It emphasizes that social enterprises are very diverse, multi-sectoral phenomena that seek capital through a variety of mixes of governmental, philanthropic, and market-based income and investment. The chapter extends the benefits theory of not-for-profit funding so that it can be applied to a variety of social purpose organizational forms, not just not-for-profit organizations; and so that it can encompass how social entrepreneurs finance their ventures. The latter involves them matching their mission interests with the potential sources of finance deriving from the mix of public and private benefits their ventures provide. This development and application of benefits theory exposes challenges for social finance: it seems likely that social enterprises will be perennially undercapitalized relative to the benefits they can potentially offer—unless compensatory entrepreneurial strategies and public policies are enacted.

The chapter investigates two ideal types of knowledge about and for social innovations combating poverty: A model of linear change based on standardized knowledge and a context-sensitive model based on tacit knowledge for transformative alternatives. Case study analysis focussed on the field of homelessness and re-use. Six housing first initiatives in six European cities and two large networks of work integration social enterprises in UK and Flanders were studied to disentangle the dualist model by exploring how and why practitioners use different types of knowledge to pursue their respective mission. While codification and standardisation pushes for standardized knowledge, contextual knowledge is important for successful implementation. In all cases, the respective governance of producing and disseminating knowledge was decisive for effective agency. Knowledge alliances based on multi-level collaborations between stakeholders with different perspectives and forms of expertise were identified as promising forms of producing and disseminating knowledge to upscale and to diffuse socially innovative initiatives and approaches.

This chapter explores how social enterprise law can shape social enterprise exits, whether by sale, dissolution, or bankruptcy. It explains that the threat of exit looms large over social enterprises, their founders, and their investors. It then draws on lessons from unlikely sources—venture capital, public company mergers and acquisitions, and small business finance—to design contract terms and corporate governance provisions that can prevent exit from threatening a venture’s social mission. The chapter argues that even in the context of exit by dissolution, contract, and governance can be deployed to preserve a firm’s chosen balance of finance and social mission. It cautions social entrepreneurs and investors, however, that the utility of these tools wanes if a venture becomes insolvent. Whether in a formal bankruptcy proceeding or a more informal dissolution, if assets are insufficient to meet a social enterprise’s financial obligations, creditors’ interests become paramount.

This chapter examines how social enterprises can improve the well-being of young people who are not in education, employment or training (NEET). NEET or NEETs refer to young people aged 16–24 who are not in education, employment or training. There are two subcategories of NEETs: unemployed young people (those who are actively seeking work) and economically inactive young people (those who have not actively sought work recently and/or are unable to start work imminently). The chapter first explains what we mean by ‘NEET’, ‘well-being’ and ‘social enterprise’ before providing an overview of the prevalence and make-up of the NEET population. It then considers the risk factors of becoming NEET and the consequences of NEET status, along with the social impact of social enterprises. It also uses the case of the Cambridgeshire County Council in Scotland to show how budget cuts adversely affect NEETs and concludes by emphasising the importance of entrepreneurship for NEETs.