Social Enterprise and the Third Sector ― Changing European Landscapes in a Comparative Perspective

"The concepts of social enterprise and social entrepreneurship is attracting rapidly increasing attention from academic spheres, policy makers as well as field workers who are setting up new initiatives or reshaping their organizations. These concepts are perceived as defining innovative and dynamic responses to major global challenges in today societies. Although the debate is now developing at the world level, the research and field-level landscapes still differ very significantly among regions and diversity also exists within specific regions such as Europe. This book presents the more comprehensive set of contributions reflecting the European side of this wide debate, with frequent connections to evolutions in other parts of the world. It examines the conceptualization of social enterprise that resulted from the EMES's very first collaborative work. Social Enterprise and the Third Sector will appeal to all third sector researchers, and social economy and social enterprise MBA and postgraduate students as well as intellectual social enterprise leaders and practitioners"--

Jacques Defourny is professor of third sector economics at HEC Management School, University of Liege (Belgium) where he is also a director of the Centre for Social Economy. He was a founding coordinator (1996-2001) and then the first president (2002-2010) of the EMES European Research Network. His work focuses on comparisons of social enterprise models across the world and on conceptual and quantitative analysis of the third sector both in developed as well as developing countries

Lars Hulgard is professor of social entrepreneurship at Roskilde University (RUC), Denmark. He has been the president of the EMES International Research Network since 2010, and is the chair of the research group Social Innovation and Organizational Learning. He is the founder and co-director of the Centre for Social Entrepreneurship and his research interests are on the relation between civil society, the third sector and social entrepreneurship as well as the role of social enterprise in the transition of the welfare state

Victor Pestoff is a professor at the Institute for Civil Society Studies, Ersta Skondal University College in Stockholm, Sweden. His research focuses on the political impact of third sector organizations and cooperatives and he has published more than a dozen books on such topics. He is also a founding member of the EMES International Research Network