Garcia, Ellen, Ventura, Ona, Arévalo, Helena, Vilafranca, Júlia, Petrova, Selena, Karadzhinova, Monika, Zlatova, Khrystyna, Manesiotis, Emmanouil, Konstantopoulos, Panagiotis, Mouchakis, Vasileios, Bonaita, Sara, Bonito, Sabino Marco, Bonito, Cristina, Gallo, Florian, Pikiou, Maria Aikaterini, Giouskaeva, Anastasia, Panousi, Virginia, and Grigoropoulou, Maria Nefeli
The term 'social enterprise' was first used in Italy at the end of the 1980s to refer to a number of newly established private initiatives directly engaged in the production of social services and in productive activities aimed at promoting the employment of disadvantaged people. Initially, they were often started and run by volunteers, and during the 1990-2000 decade the concept of social enterprise was used with increasing frequency in other countries, European and non. Over time, the term has been increasingly used in both scientific and legislative circles, also to qualify entrepreneurial initiatives in sectors other than their original ones, engaged in the production of an increasingly wide range of goods and services. It is thus increasingly not the goods and services produced that define an enterprise as social, but rather the objectives and the way in which production is carried out. The most complete definition of a social enterprise, capable of taking into account the most recent developments, is the one drawn up at the end of the 1990s by the Emes network (Borzaga & Defourny, 2001; Defourny & Nyssens, 2008), which is articulated along two dimensions: the economic-entrepreneurial and the social. The former requires the existence of four requirements: a production of goods and/or services in a continuous and professional form; a high degree of autonomy in both establishment and management; the assumption by the founders and owners of a significant level of economic risk; the presence, alongside volunteers or users, of a certain number of paid workers. The social dimension, on the other hand, requires the possession of the following characteristics: having the explicit objective of producing benefits for the community as a whole or for disadvantaged groups; being a collective initiative, having governance entrusted exclusively or predominantly to stakeholders other than the owners of the capital; ensure broad participation in decision-making processes, provide for non-distributability of profits, or at most limited distributability.