This paper argues that social enterprises (SE) in EU Member States share at least following common features: the dominance of a social or societal objective over market goal, an apparent social responsibility, particularly in the field of profit distribution. However, numeric limits for the criteria of SE identification remain ‘unclear’: in the majority of cases there are no comprehensible requirements regarding the employment of vulnerable groups and the reinvestment of profits into social projects. Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Finland, Italy, Lithuania, and Slovakia advocate accuracy and precision in dealing with the terminology surrounding SE regulatory and legal acts to the greatest extent. Being a significant facilitator of sustainable development, SE growth has a close relationship with certain macroeconomic factors. Our correlation and regression analysis clearly proves that there are certain factors of financial and social environment which have the greatest impact on the increase of the number of SE per 10,000 population, namely: Monetary Freedom, Income Distribution and Helping a Stranger. The first two factors show the impact of government regulation quality in business relation, including the links between employers and employees. The latter factor demonstrates an average social perception of so-called ‘inclusion ideas’ in different societies.
Economic security of each country is determined by array of different factors. Some factors seem obvious and are measurable, while other factors, such as entrepreneurship and, especially social entrepreneurship, are tacit and hard to measure. Anyway, social entrepreneurship is accepted globally as a bridge between business and benevolence. It attempts to find solution to local sustainability issues that are normally not addressed by traditional organizations. The problems faced by the Middle East society in general and Saudi Arabia in particular is unique in nature. Most of such problems cannot be addressed by the Government or the traditional organisations. The utility of social entrepreneurship arises here. There are many social enterprises in Saudi Arabia that have succeeded in nurturing a band of new leaders who are attempting to enhance the region’s global competitiveness, with a social touch. The present paper presents a few social entrepreneurs who have made their mark in Saudi society, and provides suggestions for nurturing and sustaining social entrepreneurships.
This research article presents sustainable model system based framework derived from the scholarly investigation into the existent research literature on social entrepreneurship. The social entrepreneurship is emerging as a viable alternative to the traditional institutional setups for making a sustainable impact and reach towards the underserved needs of the low-income population living in the developing economies. The existing research on social entrepreneurship lacks focus on creating an integrated framework thereby posing a limitation to the entry, growth and penetration of the social entrepreneurship based market setup. The sustainable model system comprises a combination of the constraining conditions and key choices. The constraining conditions include the environmental and firm-specific constraints like need addressed, mission type and socio-economic objectives. The relative impact and significance of the key choices vary for different social enterprises depending upon the applicable constraining conditions.
Over the years there has been a phenomenal growth in the number of social enterprises in India. This is partly a consequence of a new policy of the government to gradually withdraw from social development activities. The gap thus created is being filled by social enterprises. A social enterprise can be a for-profit or not-for-profit venture engaged in income-generating activities with an agenda of bringing positive change in the society. While social enterprises are engaged in the development of people, it is rather paradoxical that they experience a variety of problems with respect to the management of human resources within their enterprises. It is common knowledge that social enterprises perennially struggle with various critical human resources issues such as getting employees at low rates of compensation, providing growth opportunities for employees within the organization, retaining talent especially in the middle management, providing clearly defined roles and tasks to employees, leading to high attrition and increasing the cost of acquiring and training new employees. Thus, it becomes critical for social enterprises to think out-of-the-box and try a variety of innovative strategies to overcome these problems. This paper discusses a few such innovative HR strategies adopted by social enterprises to attract and retain talent, such as offering jobs to people with vision and value congruence, enhancing the credibility of the organization through brand building, providing opportunities for personal growth, creating a sense of ownership among employees through participation in decision making, creating sense of ownership among employees by giving equity shares, creating entrepreneurial opportunities within the organization, finding employees from among beneficiaries, attracting employees to serene lifestyle in peaceful and scenic location and providing attractive fringe benefits to the employees. Collectively these strategies seem to suggest that social enterprises adopt a ‘partnership paradigm’ for managing their employees.