Social Enterprise

Many businesses consider themselves to have social objectives, for example a company that makes environmentally beneficial products but social enterprises are distinctive because their social or environmental purpose is central to what they do. That said, social enterprises are also different from a standard charity too in that they use a business-like approach to tackling social problems rather than relying entirely on grants.

In order to understand the distinctive of social enterprises, this paper proposes to start, with a description of the defining social enterprise by variety literature, with a view to a critical judgment of them. Then it presents, we will delineate several features of social enterprises, how their target groups and governance structure diverse to traditional tenets of corporation. It finally discusses part, the different forms of social enterprise existing, we learned that defining the concept is often characterized by disagreements and ambiguity, revealing a sector with an unclear and fluid identity. with a concern not to limit the analysis to certified social enterprises.

It seems that there is no universal, commonly accepted definition of social enterprise. OECD (OECD, 1999) (ref9) has emphasis on social enterprise as any activities whose main purpose is not the maximization of profit but the attainment of certain economic and social goals. In other words, they propose the main feature of social enterprise is that businesses based around values that place on meeting social needs than building shareholder value. This definition is not particularly informative, mainly because it fails to explain what “social” means. Even strictly profit-maximizing firms have a social purpose, such as providing employment or enhancing consumers’ welfare. Even if strictly profit-maximizing firms are excluded, this definition remains extremely wide and indiscriminate in scope. It includes essentially any form of hybrid enterprise that combines some for-profit and nonprofit motives, including corporate social responsibility initiatives, corporate charity, stakeholder models of the corporation under which managers may maximize the welfare