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International audience ; In France, thestructuring of the social and Solidarity Economy (ESS) is the result of two long-term dynamics: the consolidation of a Historical Social Economy (ESH), composed of large cooperatives, associations and mutuals, throughout the 20th century; the emergence, during the 1970s-2000, of a New Social Economy (NES) composed above all of new generation cooperatives and associations.Social Political Economy (SPE) refers to the two thought currents attached to ESH and NES, whose legitimacy is based on a convergence of their academic production and institutional recognition.The process of isomorphism-banalisation, which over the decades has affected companies adjacent to the cooperative, mutellist and associationist movements, has been helped by the gradual erosion of the key principles of SPE (non-profit-making, dual quality, free membership, democratic governance).Employer associations have thus been exposed in recent years to the rapid diffusion-extension of entrepreneurial and managerial standards.The State promotes a new tutelary/competitive order through the dissemination of control-evaluation rules and the introduction of public quasi-markets.This evolution corresponds to a transmutation of SPE, which reveals the attributes of a Social Business Economy(SBE).Constituting a third sector distinct from the market-capitalist economy and the public economy, SBEhas been confirmed by the creation of a Nonprofit Sector composed of non-profit organizations (NPOs).NPOs are mainly employer associations in France.Starting from the economic Market and State failures, neo-institutionalist theory provides rational explanations for the presence of private non-profit organizations with a social/societal vocation.A similar theoretical argument highlights the institutional failures of NPOs, leading to a renewed conception of Social Business Economy (SBE)and the emergence of the socialfirm category.Therefore, the purpose of our contribution is to examine the model of the social firm in relation to ...

AbstractPolicy perspectives of the European Union as well as those of member states currently link the concepts of social investment and social entrepreneurship in order to advocate both where and how to intervene. The argument of this article is that the explicit linking of these two notions, by policy-makers at several different levels and scales of authority, constitutes an emerging policy paradigm. The article identifies three characteristics of any paradigm, including that a policy paradigm must provide a perspective on the maintenance of the well-being of both society and individuals. Despite variation across countries and levels of authority (a characteristic of any paradigm) policy communities proffer the quasi-concepts of social investment and social entrepreneurship in combination as the appropriate ways to govern financing and the delivery of social investments. Therefore, social enterprises are targeted to receive public financing in order to deliver social investments in activation (training, employability, job support and wage supplements) as well as childcare. Reliance on this assemblage is documented across scales from the local through the national, transnational and international.

Information plays an important role in the individual lives of people, and social media as an aspect of online information phenomenon is an exciting topic to explore in terms of its impact on social entrepreneurship. Many theoretical fields have contributed to the development of social entrepreneurship, looking in particular at the financial, political, and psychological impacts. This chapter is unique since it focuses on social enterprises and the impact of evolving technologies on social entrepreneurship. This chapter contributes to the literature on social media usage in social enterprises and offers a better understanding of the issues in the specific context of developing countries.