Social Entrepreneurship. Self-employment and value extraction in the post-crisis era

Abstract

Social Entrepreneurship emerged in Catalonia after 2008 and offered an occupational alternative fostered by financial actors and public administrations to respond to two major problems aggravated by the financial crisis: the creation of stable work and the resolution of socio-ecological problems. The new entrepreneurship, headed by a self-employed creative class, faces the tensions of balancing market orientation and social objectives. We hold sustain that the new label - social enterprise - We argue that the new label - social entrepreneurship - is part of a policy that reflects the alliance between financial interests, business schools and the neoliberal state aimed at covering the material and ideological fracture left by the economic crisis.. The paper provides, on the one hand, an empirical contribution to the universe of social entrepreneurship (based on the analysis of 43 case studies of social enterprises, 93 surveys of entrepreneurs and a database of 347 entities) and, on the other, a theoretical approach to better understand this evolving phenomenon as the product of new and sophisticated ways of Capitalist value extraction.