‘Shaping Social Enterprise’ helps researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and international development actors better understand various institutional paths of social enterprise development and where institutional strengths and weaknesses may be located.

This book review presents “Shaping Social Enterprise: Understanding Institutional Context and Influence”, edited by Janelle Kerlin and published by Emerald Publishing Limited in 2017. It does so by briefly illustrating the content of the various chapters and by identifying strengths and weaknesses of the analyses. The book presents a productive debate as well as useful data from which scholars, practitioners, and policymakers can learn essential lessons about the evolution models of social enterprises in different countries.

The first comparative look at how social enterprise is shaped by local conditions worldwide

Wharton professor Ian C. MacMillan and Dr. James Thompson, director of the Wharton Social Entrepreneurship Program, provide a tough-love approach that significantly increases the likelihood of a successful social enterprise launch in the face of the high-uncertainty conditions typically encountered by social entrepreneurs.

In the absence of a widely accepted and common definition of social enterprise (SE), a large research project, the "International Comparative Social Enterprise Models" (ICSEM) Project, was carried out over a five-year period; it involved more than 200 researchers from 55 countries and relied on bottom-up approaches to capture the SE phenomenon. This strategy made it possible to take into account and give legitimacy to locally embedded approaches, thus resulting in an analysis encompassing a wide diversity of social enterprises, while simultaneously allowing for the identification of major SE models to delineate the field on common grounds at the international level. These SE models reveal or confirm an overall trend towards new ways of sharing the responsibility for the common good in today’s economies and societies. We tend to consider as good news the fact that social enterprises actually stem from all parts of the economy. Indeed, societies are facing many complex challenges at all levels, from the local to the global level. The diversity and internal variety of SE models are a sign of a broadly shared willingness to develop appropriate—although sometimes embryonic—responses to these challenges, on the basis of innovative economic/business models driven by a social mission. In spite of their weaknesses, social enterprises may be seen as advocates for and vehicles of the general interest across the whole economy. Of course, the debate about privatisation, deregulation and globalised market competition—all factors that may hinder efforts in the search for the common good–has to be addressed as well. The first of a series of four ICSEM books, Social Enterprise in Asia will serve as a key reference and resource for teachers, researchers, students, experts, policy makers, journalists and other categories of people who want to acquire a broad understanding of the phenomena of social enterprise and social entrepreneurship as they emerge and develop across the world.

An expert’s inside look into the ways social entrepreneurship is changing the world Whether you’re a policymaker, investor, or involved in a nonprofit, Social Entrepreneurship for the 21st Century gives you the knowledge you need to make the best possible decisions for the future. A former McKinsey consultant reveals how social entrepreneurship has filtered into the workings of government and private enterprise, where social sector values are now shaping “social impact” capitalism. Georgia Levenson Keohane is a Roosevelt Institute fellow, foundation executive, and former McKinsey consultant. She advises a range of poverty-fighting organizations, including philanthropies (Robin Hood Foundation), educational entities (New York City Charter School Center), community development organizations (Civic Builders), and think tanks (The Aspen Institute). She is an adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School.

Innovation and Scaling for Impact forces us to reassess how social sector organizations create value. Drawing on a decade of research, Christian Seelos and Johanna Mair transcend widely held misconceptions, getting to the core of what a sound impact strategy entails in the nonprofit world. They reveal an overlooked nexus between investments that might not pan out (innovation) and expansion based on existing strengths (scaling). In the process, it becomes clear that managing this tension is a difficult balancing act that fundamentally defines an organization and its impact. The authors examine innovation pathologies that can derail organizations by thwarting their efforts to juggle these imperatives. Then, through four rich case studies, they detail innovation archetypes that effectively sidestep these pathologies and blend innovation with scaling. Readers will come away with conceptual models to drive progress in the social sector and tools for defining the future of their organizations.