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As Public Goes Private, Social Emerges: The Rise of Social Enterprise

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Abstract

This article explores the relationship between social enterprise and a much-longer known set of arrangements generally comprehended as “public enterprise” (or “state-owned enterprise”). It considers the decline in some contexts in the use of, and interest in, public enterprise that reflects the impact of the privatization movement, and the rise of social enterprise as an alternative form—with speculation about cause-and-effect connections between these movements. An exploration of this sort may contribute in the longer term to a better understanding of the place of “public”, “social” and “community” values and structures within the general framework of governance.

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Notes

  1. For a recent discussion of the nature of “publicness”, see Aulich 2011.

  2. For a more extensive list of references, see Hayllar and Wettenhall 2011. We are grateful to the City University of Hong Kong for a Strategic Grant (Project number 7002538) which has facilitated the basic research on social enterprise.

  3. Needless to say, public enterprise of this sort is especially prevalent in the centrally planned economies.

  4. For commentaries with Australian examples, see Wettenhall 2007, 2009.

  5. Of course, they did not always attain these ideals. But they did it far more often than the privatizers, with their vested interest in denigrating them, would allow.

  6. For selected articles, see Wettenhall and Thynne 2005b.

  7. The cooperative movement has its own dedicated intellectual and practitioner following, to be seen, e.g., in the journal Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics. The year 2012 was declared to be the International Year of Co-operatives by the United Nations.

  8. See Hayllar and Wettenhall 2011: 21–23 for some indications of this “explosive growth”. To cite the UK case alone: some 55,000 SEs were identified in 2006, employing over 3.3 % of the working age population. Over 62,000 were identified in 2007, and recent estimates suggest that by 2010 they were contributing £24 billion to the economy in terms of Gross Value Added (from Social Enterprise UK 2011).

  9. The Grameen Bank is generally considered to be one of the largest. It won its Bangladeshi founder Muhammad Younis a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 and has grown into the “Grameen Family” of over two dozen enterprises today: Grameen Bank 2013.

  10. See especially Ostrom 1990; Ostrom, et al. 2002. Ostrom’s work in this area made her the 2009 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences.

  11. Complemented by a Right to Run initiative giving frontline staff a right to run services, on which see Hampson 2010.

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Correspondence to Mark Richard Hayllar.

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Hayllar, M.R., Wettenhall, R. As Public Goes Private, Social Emerges: The Rise of Social Enterprise. Public Organiz Rev 13, 207–217 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11115-013-0234-y

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