Editorial

Citation

Doherty, B. (2009), "Editorial", Social Enterprise Journal, Vol. 5 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/sej.2009.37305caa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Social Enterprise Journal, Volume 5, Issue 3

I am delighted to introduce to you the third issue in 2009 of the fifth volume of Social Enterprise Journal (SEJ) published by Emerald Group Publishing. First, I would like to thank the journal board, the selected reviewers and of course, the authors for the papers enclosed. This issue is largely influenced by papers presented at the recent Second EMES International Conference on Social Enterprise, which took place in Trento, Italy on 1-4 July 2009.

This conference was groundbreaking as it was the first time researchers from 38 countries all over the world gathered on the very specific topic of social enterprise and social entrepreneurship. This conference was memorable for a number of key reasons including; the significant progress made on the interdisciplinary dialogue surrounding social enterprise, the refined research questions, range of methodologies presented and the strong efforts demonstrated at the conference to collect empirical information well beyond case studies. This was illustrated by a number of papers relying on careful surveys of samples of social enterprises, which allowed statistical and econometric treatments. The first three papers in this issue are the First Symposium from the 2009 EMES International Conference on Social Enterprise.

The first paper in this issue in fact was awarded the title of best paper by the SEJ at the EMES conference. The author is C. Sara L. Minard and the paper is titled “Valuing entrepreneurship in the informal economy in Senegal”. Sara is based at: Institut d'Etudes Politiques (Sciences-Po) in Paris and is also a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University in New York. The paper is an excellent application of the discourse surrounding social entrepreneurship into the informal economy in West Africa. In fact, the EMES conference was memorable on many levels including the formation of a Social Enterprise African Network of scholars, who have been set the challenge of developing a special edition of SEJ focused on social enterprise in Africa for 2012.

The second paper resulting from the EMES conference by Giulia Galera and Carlo Borzaga titled “Social enterprise. An international overview of its conceptual evolution and legal implementation” created much discussion at the EMES conference. The paper is an excellent conceptual piece, which looks at how the terms of social enterprise and social entrepreneurship have been used in the literature and the paper highlights the variety of meanings. This paper builds very well on the debate articulated by Professor John Thompson (Huddersfield Business School, UK) in his paper in SEJ, Volume 4, Issue 2 in 2008, titled “Social enterprise and social entrepreneurship, where have we reached?”

The third paper is a research article also presented at the second EMES conference on social enterprise by Wim van Opstal, Eva Deraedt and Caroline Gijselinckx from HIVA at the Catholic University of Leuven (affiliated to the Centre d'Economie Sociale, HEC – University of Liège), titled “Monitoring profile shifts and differences among WISEs in Flanders” (Belgium). Over the past 20 years, the sector of Work Integration Social Enterprises (WISEs) has grown considerably all across Europe. While WISEs originally focused on sheltered employment for people with disabilities, in recent times many governments have embraced WISEs as an active labour market policy tool to address an expanding scope of disadvantaged workers. Measurement of the effectiveness of these policies remains scarce, also many governments do not even have a clear sight into the profile of WISEs they are supporting. In this paper, the authors utilise data from a newly designed monitoring instrument to capture the profile of WISEs in Flanders (Belgium). The paper cleverly evaluates whether these profile shifts and differences are in accordance with policy choices made.

The fourth paper by Dr Rosario Laratta from the University of Tokyo titled “Autonomy and accountability in social services nonprofits: Japan and UK” looks at two recent investigations of social services nonprofits in both Japan and the UK. This excellent paper makes an important contribution to the understanding of collaborative relations between government and nonprofits, as well as providing meaningful insights in the search for an alternative governance system for the provision of social services under a post welfare-state regime. The fifth and final paper is by Dr Malin Tillmar (Associate Professor in Business Administration at Linköping University in Sweden). Tillmar's research focuses on the diversity of entrepreneurship. Her paper in this issue is titled “Societal entrepreneurs in the health sector: crossing the frontiers” and the paper explores societal entrepreneurship in the turbulent health-care sector in a changing welfare state in Sweden.

Further discussions have also taken place post EMES 2009 conference regarding a Social Enterprise Research Network in South East Asia, followed by a special issue in 2011 focused on the role of social enterprise in this region.

Bob Doherty