Institutional and organizational variety is increasingly characterising advanced economic systems. While traditional economic theories have focussed almost exclusively on profit-maximizing (i.e. for-profit) enterprises and on publicly-owned organizations, the increasing relevance of non-profit...

To date, the dominant economic approaches have downplayed and marginalised the role of cooperative and social enterprises in contemporary market economies. This insufficient attention derives from the limited applicability to the case of cooperative and social enterprises of two of the main...

Social enterprises (SEs) have been active for some decades and have been regulated by law in several countries. Their operation showed ability to complement the provision of welfare services, especially social services, by the public sector and private enterprises, and to innovate in the...

This paper considers resource coordination in production systems featuring the presence of enterprises and organizations pursuing social, health-related, educational, cultural, and environmental aims, or social enterprises (SEs). The resource coordination problem is one of allocating and...

This paper contributes to the literature by carrying out the first empirical investigation into the role of different types of enterprises in the creation of social trust. Drawing on a unique dataset collected through the administration of a questionnaire to a representative sample of the...

Though the measurement and implication of human capital on economic growth has been well established since the works of Becker in the 1960s, recently Florida has argued that creative class is superior to human capital in explaining economic growth. The underlying difference between the two...

Standard economic theory predicts that the accumulation of capital by means of indivisible reserves would lead to underinvestment and undercapitalization due to the truncated temporal horizon of worker-members in cooperatives (the so-called “Furubotn-Pejovich effect”). An inefficiently low...

Contemporary literature dealing with the governance of the exploitation of common-pool natural resources was initiated by Elinor Ostrom in 1990, and has been growing fast ever since. On the contrary, within the same research stream, the study of the presence and economic role of common resources...