Social Entrepreneurship

Social Enterprise: an alternative paradigm for cooperation and development
(Bengo, Irene)

Social Reporting and Planning in Consumers' Cooperative: The Experience of Unicoop Tirreno
(Bianchi, Lara & Frey, Marco & Battaglia, Massimo & Maiello, Antonella)

Fairtrade & Institutional Entrepreneurship: A Framework for Exploratory Discourse Analysis
(Salignac, Fanny & Seymour, Richard & Welch, Catherine)

Social Enterprise: an alternative paradigm for cooperation and development
(Bengo, Irene)

The recent economic crisis has underlined some critical aspects in the current economic system, which fails to answer to the interdependency principles and social problems of global development. This situation has highlighted the need of new economic, entrepreneurial and social development structures to meet the needs of at least a part of the problem.

A configuration which appears potentially interesting to answer to this problem is the social enterprise, which is defined as “private, autonomous, entrepreneurial organizations providing goods or services with an explicit aim to benefit the community. They are owned or managed by a group of citizens, and the material interest of capital investors is subject to limits. Social enterprises place a high value on their autonomy and on economic risk-taking related to ongoing socioeconomic Activity...”

Till now social enterprises were implemented mainly in developed countries, however with relevant differences in their features depending on their location. Moving from this consideration this paper analyzes different case study of social enterprise related to management and distribution of public services, investigating them at different levels: the local framework of Italy and the international contest of Europe.

Based on the review of the existing case, the paper aims to:
- Compare organizational dimensions (properties, structures and strategies) of the existing cases
- Analyse the political, social and cultural reasons that explain the social enterprises structures
- Underline the rationale behind success or failures stories
- Identifying some open issues, to be further developed in the following stages of the PhD thesis.

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Social Reporting and Planning in Consumers' Cooperative: The Experience of Unicoop Tirreno
(Bianchi, Lara & Frey, Marco & Battaglia, Massimo & Maiello, Antonella)

This paper presents the evidences from a case study about responsible accounting and reporting. In particular, we deepen the path of social reporting system of one of the bigger consumers’ cooperative in Italy, Unicoop Tirreno. One of the things that make the difference between a consumers’ cooperative and the other large-scale retail is its ownership. A coop belongs to its members and was founded pursuing the scope of mutuality. In this sense, the aim and the foundations of economic action for the company are the fulfillment of the members and the protection of their interests.

However, a large growth and lately some economic difficulties, with the necessity to stay on the market, created a detachment between the real property (members) and the management structure of the company. To rediscover the value of being a cooperative, a good starting point is recreation and reinforcement of the trust between members and the firm. From this, the choice of Unicoop Tirreno to renew and improve the social reporting instruments follows. In this paper we describe the evolution of the coop reporting system: the reorganization of the annual social report and the creation of an annual social plan, establishing a circle of programming the future policies and actions, and verifying the implementation of these. We also present the new process to data collection, the redefinition of the indicators, and the possibility to achieve an international standard reporting framework.

Finally, the paper gives an account about the opportunity to use the social reporting documents as internal management tools, as well as communicative instruments towards cooperative’s members and other stakeholders.

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Fairtrade & Institutional Entrepreneurship: A Framework for Exploratory Discourse Analysis
(Salignac, Fanny & Seymour, Richard & Welch, Catherine)

Abstract

This paper introduces the concept and history of Fairtrade, reviewing its goals (the improvement in the livelihood of third-world producers), how it has grown out of the co-operative movement of the nineteenth century, and how it is increasingly prominent in today's globalised and consumer-centric economies. It then presents the argument that academics have oversimplified the phenomenon by considering Fairtrade from the opposing positions of utility maximization and ethical behaviour.

The field of Institutional Entrepreneurship is then presented and reviewed as a potential framework to allow academics to correct this mistake. The paper then determines the extent to which Fairtrade can be understood as an Institution and whether that Institution has succeeded in creating value for Fairtrade companies' stakeholders, specifically for producers. The literature review concludes that Fairtrade can be understood within the framework of Institutional Entrepreneurship.

Utilising the Institutional framework, the role that recent discourse has played in the emergence of Fairtrade is then examined. Data will be presented from secondary sources published in The UK and France. The discourses through which retailers of the North talk about their Southern producers will be studied as a means of identifying the voice Fairtrade is spreading.

The importance of the discursive context within which new institutions are built will be explored, enabling meaningful conclusions to be drawn as to how fair and just is the Institution Fairtrade. The paper enriches our understanding of firm behaviour and inter-firm linkages in international business, which until now has been dominated by traditional concepts of transactional and economic frameworks.

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