Latin American Social Enterprise Models in a Worldwide Perspective

The last two or three decades have witnessed a high number of conceptual attempts to define social enterprise (SE). It is rather easy today to identify the criteria or distinctive features that were most debated in such conceptual discussions: the primacy of social aims (Nicholls 2006); the search for market income in non-profit organisations, as developed by Skloot (1983) as early as the 1980s, and then more widely in “mission-driven business” (Austin et al. 2006); the specific profile and role of individual social entrepreneurs as described by Dees (1998); the place of innovation, from the Schumpeterian works of Young (1983) through those of Mulgan (2007) on social innovation; and the issue of governance, for a sustainable balance between economic and social objectives, as highlighted by the EMES International Research Network (Defourny and Borzaga 2001).