University of Vaasa - Vaasan yliopisto

The Social Entrepreneurship According To a Narrow
Perspective
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Few authors identify the essence of the Social Enterprises with all initiatives
promoted by non-profit organizations looking for alternative sources of funding or
management skills to support the creation of social value (references). According to
this perspective, SE consists mainly in the adoption of managerial and market-based
approaches, typical of private and for profit sector, by the third sector in order to
improve efficiency and effectiveness in the production of consumer goods and or in
the delivery of social services.
Therefore, this definition tackles all the nonprofit organizations that, while not
distorting their non-profit essence, undertake collateral private activities to integrate
the income and support the core activities. The SE is, in this perspective, nothing but
a means of "funding", in addition to public or private traditional opportunities
(Perrini 2007).
The SE therefore emerges as a rational and strategic answer found by the
organizations of the third sector to the challenges of a critical situation: scarcity of
available resources, cuts of public funding, higher costs and more competitive
pressure but also an increasing demand for social services, major privatization of
public services and a generalized crisis of traditional welfare systems. In this sense
the non-profit expectations of effectiveness in filling the gap left uncovered by the
public, prompted the organizations operating in the social sector to reinvent their
models of management. They aimed at an hybrid organizational model between
profit and non profit.
The Social Entrepreneurship According To an Enlarged
Perspective
Most recent contributions in the field of SE lead to an enlarged vision of the concept,
not limited to the legal-organizational form chosen, but rather focused on the its
content and activities.
The supporters of the expanded view of the SE (Borzaga, 2004, Johnson, 2000; Mair
and Martí, 2004; Perrini, 2007) claim that the phenomenon should be considered as
intersectorial and place emphasis primarily on the entrepreneurial / innovative
content of activity and on social change that results. Consistent with this approach,
SE’s dominant feature is related to applying creativity and innovation in dealing with
social problems, thus characterizing the business process (MacMillan and McGrath,
2000). For this reason, the legal form becomes less important than the objective of
contributing to social change (MacMillan, 2005; Perrini, 2007). The expanded
perspective on the SE seems to justify the use of the business term, and including in
discussion a series of initiatives that do not belong to the third sector. These
initiatives are projected to develop profit activities, while maintaining the specific
objective of raising the social, cultural and economic environment in which they
operate.