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23 Social financing, social economy: Chantier de l’Économie Sociale Trust, Montreal Jean-Marc Fontan and Denis Bussières Context For several years, managers of social economy enterprises have been expressing the need to have access to financial products other than traditional grants and loans, while at the same time asking how best to maintain their business capital over the long term. They deemed that new products which kept their social mission in mind would be needed. At the request of the Chantier de l’Économie Sociale Trust, a study on these issues was
Chapter 5 . The social economy of dearth in early modern England* I T he impoverished repertory of English folk-tales lacks those stories – common in other early modern European societies – in which peasant culture confronts the dilemma of too many mouths to feed, and in which supernatural salvation so often took the form of a superabundance of food.1 This hitherto largely unnoticed absence of English Hansels and Gretels wandering through a Malthusian world takes on added meaning in the light of recent work on the demography of early modern England. This work
and services contracted ( Cornia, 1987 ). Moving to catch up, so to speak, by the 1990s a ‘post-social’ economy was consolidating in the global North. While marked differences remain, the North and South have drawn together around the economic logic of precarity. In the latter, fuelled by jobless growth, for several decades a self-reproducing informal sector has been by far the largest employer and supplier of goods and services ( Meagher, 2016 ). For the North, precarity has taken the form of the disappearance of ‘good’ jobs as the casualisation
Social enterprise and third sector activity have mushroomed into a prolific area of academic research and discourse over the past 20 years, with many claiming their origins rooted in Blair, New Labour and Giddens’ ‘Third Way’. But many academic contributions lack experience of policy implementation and do not access the wealth of grey, legacy and public policy literature from earlier periods which supports different interpretations. Since most make few references to developments during the 1970s and 1980s, their narrow focus on New Labour from 1997 onwards not only neglects real antecedents, but miscasts the role of social enterprise.
Adopting a Critical Realist approach, the author had access to previously unused hardcopy documents from archives and collections and interviewed key players and key actors between 1998 and 2002, when major social enterprise and third sector policy changes occurred.
During a key political period from 1998 to 2002, Blair’s New Labour governments forced through a major conceptual shift for social enterprise, co-operative and third sector activity. Many structures, formed as community responses to massive deindustrialisation in the 1970s and 1980s, were repositioned to bid against the private sector to obtain contracts for delivery of low-cost public services.
Other UK academic contributions draw parallels with North American individual social entrepreneurs or rely excessively on interpretations from L’Emergence de l’Entreprise Sociale en Europe (EMES) Research Network, which prioritises a marketised version of “work integration social enterprises” (WISEs).
So the restoration of political and economic democracy has been denied to many local communities.
market economy, the author contends below that these are often not helpful to UK comparisons. There are also wide-ranging discourses in mainland Europe, from which UK contributions have only imported the smaller, more marketised EMES variant. Regulationist approaches and those in Quebec are also covered below, since though they were contemporaneous with social economy and social enterprise developments
a wider social economy, leaving models based on a marketised approach that are failing in the UK. Social enterprise structures are unable to maintain their values in a changed funding environment and academic contributions have failed to analyse the social economy as a means to advance better forms of local economic democracy. Social enterprise and the wider third sector have been institutionalised as a
enterprises ( Borzaga and Defourny 2001 , Nyssens 2006a )” ( Fecher and Lévesque 2008 , 694). Thus, in the United States, nonprofits moved into social enterprise activities to finance provision of services. Reliance on these models has driven UK social enterprise policy in the direction of the market and further away from concepts of a social economy and social solidarity. Filer
suggest more questions than it offers answers. Gender, class and race Colonial armies were male institutions but in peacetime the camps or ‘lines’ also housed women who played an important role in the life and social economy of each force. Frequently soldiers were encouraged to have stable relations with ‘wives’ as this was believed to be good for
Our reflection axis is an urban-natural virtuality, seen as a necessary step towards envisioning an urban utopia. For Lefebvre, the urban era succeeds the industrial era. The focus on collective reproduction, as opposed to production and/or accumulation, reunited the formerly opposed urban and natural/environmental perspectives, redefined by planetary threats. At the same time, extended urbanisation keeps on guaranteeing urban-industrial modernisation. Lefebvre’s urban society proposal demands the inclusion of nature and natural space that, although implicit in his proposal, has become crucial confronting current threats and illuminating our very understanding of contemporary everyday life. An extended naturalisation corresponds to an extended urbanisation. Movements towards any possible future envisioning call for both spatial and social justice and a continuing critical theory effort to offer some possible answers. The reunification of the urban and the environment implies the reunification of human and nature. The urban-natural, taken as an idea that reunites contemporary concerns and spatial practices within everyday life, already has countless manifestations in most parts of the world that may metaphorically represent the transformation from the industrial era into the urban era. Among Brazil's traditional peoples, that is a reality; in metropolitan areas, many such cases are found, as are many emerging popular and social economies, most of which are also ecological, pointing to other futures. The dialectical interaction between extended urbanisation and extended naturalisation entails rescuing the urban-natural variety of (and virtual) manifestations. An insufficient but necessary step towards urban utopia.
current contributions. Chapter 3 : Theoretical foundations and conceptual interpretations for the third sector, summarising literature contributions from North America and European concepts of a social economy, including the approach of French Regulationists. These contrast with the narrower market approach of L’Emergence de l’Entreprise Sociale en