Social enterprises at the crossroads of independency and partnership in international perspective

NRU Higher School of Economics , 2014.

Moskovskaya A., Atanasova A.

The paper is aimed at theoretical and empirical clarification of organizational nature of social enterprises on the basis of the international comparative study. The main idea of the paper is based on topicality of the problem of social enterprises’ “dependence - independence” on other organizations and on the government under conditions they operate at the interfaces of market, state regulation and organizational partnerships. That is why in the research we aimed at studying the following issues: - To what extent social enterprises in different countries (macro-regions) are oriented to the distinct forms of partnerships and do any of them have special bias to the state? - What factors play the main role in the character of a partnership (interactions with stakeholders)? - Do partnership forms relate to the level of independence of a social enterprise from some bigger organizations or from the state? - Can we say that “independence” is most likely a characteristics of predominantly market oriented social enterprises (in terms of business model choice)?

Keywords: government, state, stakeholder, sector, client, social enterprise, social entrepreneur