We are delighted to announce that the book Social Enterprise in Latin America is now available in Open Access! 🥳

In the last two decades, the quest for a widely accepted definition of social enterprise (SE) has been a central issue in a great number of publications. The main objective of a large research project, the “International Comparative Social Enterprise Models” (ICSEM), which involved more than 200 researchers from 55 countries, was to show that the SE field would benefit much more from linking conceptualisation efforts to the huge diversity of SEs than from an additional and ambitious attempt at providing an encompassing definition.

Starting from a hypothesis that could be called “the impossibility of a unified definition”, the ICSEM Project adopted a twofold research strategy: providing strong theoretical foundations to explain how various “institutional logics” in the whole economy may generate different SE models and relying on bottom-up approaches to capture the SE phenomenon in its local and national contexts. This strategy made it possible to take into account and give legitimacy to locally embedded approaches while simultaneously allowing for the identification of major social enterprise models to delineate the field on common grounds at the international level.

The second of a series of four ICSEM books, Social Enterprise in Latin America, is co-edited by long-standing members of EMES, Luiz Inácio Gaiger, Marthe Nyssens and Fernanda Wanderley. The volume serves as a key reference and resource for teachers, researchers, students, experts, policymakers, journalists and others who want to acquire a broad understanding of the phenomena of social enterprise and social entrepreneurship as they emerge and develop across the world.

You can also download the books Social Enterprise in Western Europe and Social Enterprise in Central and Eastern Europe, also available in Open Access.