Social Co-Operatives: When Social Enterprises Meet the Co-Operative Tradition

Abstract

The emergence of social co-operatives cannot be understood without a more detailed analysis of the worldwide fast-growing interest toward social enterprise and social entrepreneurship since the mid-1990s. Much more than US-based schools of thought, a major European conception of social enterprise actually fits the co-operative tradition, and even more precisely, the “world standards of social cooperatives” as formulated by the Organization of Industrial, Artisanal and Service Producers’ Co-operatives (CICOPA). Placing social co-operatives in a longer historical perspective shows that new waves and/or new types of co-operatives generally emerge in times of deep transformations of the whole economic system when some basic conditions are met.