Social Enterprise and the Third Sector ─ Changing European Landscapes in a Comparative Perspective

"The concepts of social enterprise and social entrepreneurship is attracting rapidly increasing attention from academic spheres, policy makers as well as field workers who are setting up new initiatives or reshaping their organizations. These concepts are perceived as defining innovative and dynamic responses to major global challenges in today societies. Although the debate is now developing at the world level, the research and field-level landscapes still differ very significantly among regions and diversity also exists within specific regions such as Europe. This book presents the more comprehensive set of contributions reflecting the European side of this wide debate, with frequent connections to evolutions in other parts of the world. It examines the conceptualization of social enterprise that resulted from the EMES's very first collaborative work. Social Enterprise and the Third Sector will appeal to all third sector researchers, and social economy and social enterprise MBA and postgraduate students as well as intellectual social enterprise leaders and practitioners"--

Lars Hulgard is Professor of social entrepreneurship at Roskilde University (RUC), Denmark, where he is President of the EMES Network, Chair of the research group Social Innovation and Organizational Learning and Chair of RUCinnovation

Jacques Defourny is professor of economics at HEC Management School, University of Liege, Belgium, where he is also a director of the Centre for Social Economy

Victor Pestoff is a Professor at the Institute for Civil Society Studies, Ersta Skondal University College in Stockholm, Sweden. He is also a founding member of the EMES Research Network on Social Enterprise