Eco-social enterprises

A transition to an equitable and sustainable degrowth society (D’Alisa et al., 2015) calls for a re-thinking of conceptualisations of the economy and of the enterprise as well as for practical changes on the ground. While some—such as Fotopoulos [see Chapter 44]—have advocated abolishing private property, markets and money altogether, we take a more practical view. We envision seeds of the future by looking at enterprises and forms of provisioning in the here-and-now that do not comply with the mainstream model of the firm [Chapter 19], nor do they mesh easily within the capitalist growth paradigm. The chapter opens with a discussion of mainstream and alternative conceptualisations of the enterprise and of the economy. Next, we turn to an overview of existing forms of eco-social enterprises and of their framings within different discourses and schools of thought. After giving some examples, we discuss five dimensions of a broad definition of eco-social enterprise, based on the literature and our own empirical research.