Does the Mission of an Organization Affect the Quality of Low-Skilled Jobs in Quasi-markets?: A Comparison Between Social Enterprises and For-Profit Organizations

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - In recent decades, many countries have witnessed the introduction of quasi-market regulation, predominantly in the field...     

Solidarity-Based Third Sector Organizations in the "Proximity Services" Field: A European Francophone Perspective

This article reviews the role of third sector organizations in the field of proximity services from a francophone perspective. We analyze how the new wave of initiatives inside the third sector in France and francophone Belgium can be seen as providing institutional responses to state and market failures that arise from trust-dependent and quasi-collective attributes of these services. These initiatives are often called solidarity based third sector organizations, a concept defined in this paper. A central assumption of this analysis is that the political context in which these services are delivered is especially important, particularly as reflected in the changing regulatory role of the state. This analysis takes, therefore, an economic sociology perspective.     

Fundamentals for an International Typology of Social Enterprise Models

The quest for a widely accepted definition of social enterprise (SE) has been a central issue in the last two decades. However, it only seems feasible today to identify a few criteria that were most debated: the specific role of individual social entrepreneurs, the place of social innovation, the search for market income and the issue of governance. The arena of conceptualization efforts should now be fed with more contributions starting from bottom-up approaches built upon a hypothesis that could be termed “the impossibility of a unified definition”. In this paper, we develop a theoretical framework combining principles of interest (mutual, general and capital interest) and resource mixes to identify institutional trajectories generating four major SE models. We then show that all four SE models may address the actual diversity of SE’s social missions. Finally, we suggest that such social missions may be enhanced differently depending on the respective governance mechanisms.     

Voluntas Symposium: Comments on Salamon and Sokolowski’s Re-conceptualization of the Third Sector

With their “Beyond Nonprofits: Re-conceptualizing the Third Sector”, Salamon and Sokolowski have made an important contribution to the ongoing debate on how to define the third sector. This Voluntas symposium brings together the comments of five leading scholars both supportive and critical of the new definition. The comments are based on a debate held at the conference of the International Society for Third Sector Research, in Stockholm in 2016.