Social enterprise as a bottom-up dynamic. Part 2: the reaction of civil society to unmet social needs in England, Scotland, Ireland, France and Romania

Over the past three decades, enterprises of a new kind, explicitly pursuing social aims, have emerged worldwide as new welfare actors (Borzaga et al. 2016). This evolution was boosted by the engagement of traditional non-profit organizations in the direct delivery of a wide spectrum of general interest services. These enterprises, commonly known as social enterprises, deliver mainly social, educational, and general or community interest services. No general consensus exists at the international level for the definition of what constitutes a social enterprise; however, intensive research by scholars and the intervention of several European legislatures has gradually resulted in a convergence of meanings that embodies the specificities of this new type of enterprise in laws. Despite the increasing number of scholars and governments that recognize the role and importance of social enterprises in solving many contemporary societal problems, the economic and social roles of social enterprises and the factors explaining both their upsurge and consolidation are still poorly understood. The widely believed idea is that social enterprises do not have features such to make them actors able to operate and develop in full autonomy (Christie and Honig 2006). Many researchers and policymakers have expressed the belief that the birth, and even more so the consolidation and scaling up of social enterprises, has been possible only because they have been incorporated into public policies and thus benefited from the related financing. An alternative explanation is that social enterprises have been promoted either by non-profit organizations as income-generating activities or by innovative entrepreneurs as a modernized form of philanthropic solidarity (Dees 1998, Yunus 2007, Laville et al. 2015). In essence, these views on social enterprises agree that they cannot emerge and develop spontaneously with a view to either address unsolved social problems or fill gaps in general interest service delivery. In one way or another, their existence must be externally driven. The failure to embrace a comprehensive approach that acknowledges the diverse modes of creation and the distinctive characteristics of social enterprises brings with it the risk of not fully understanding the phenomenon and adopting inconsistent regulations and erroneous support policies. In fact, if one follows these dominant interpretations, one almost inevitably comes to consider the collective and participatory dimension of social enterprises as not an advantage, but a cause of inefficiency. In fact, the non-profit nature