EMES Activity Report 2016
and interactions with other actors in society. This consolidation of social enterprise research has brought about the crystallization of a community of researchers in parallel to the brand new field of scientific inquiry. Such developments in the academic sphere have occurred against a backdrop of growing social challenges and changing social relations and dynamics. This context has increased the sense of urgency to find solutions both from the public and private sectors to these ‘wicked’ social problems. Indeed, policy-makers are turning their attention to social enterprises and request the help of researchers in order to inform with evidence the way policies are designed and implemented. Practitioners increasingly realize the need to be more reflexive, both as a way to be more efficient in the way they operate and to increase their influence in the policy-making process. However, social enterprises are far from being fully understood: their emergence and evolutionary trends, and their interaction with other social and economic actors, remain under researched. In this context, the fifth EMES PhD Summer School introduced innovative approaches to the study of social enterprise and contributed to the consolidation of a research community. As termed by EMES researchers in the first EMES PhD Reader, the three “SE pillars” - which include social enterprise and social entrepreneurship, social economy and solidarity economy - continued to function as conceptual anchors for the theoretical and practical discussions and workshops to be held during these four days. In addition, other notions currently driving SE-research and policy initiatives were incorporated into the Summer School such as social innovation, the third sector, buen vivir, etc. Interesting ongoing research projects were presented during the Summer School as valuable resources to illustrate the most innovative research on the SE pillars.
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