This article is an entry to be published in an International Encyclopedia of Civil Society in 2009. Mutual organizations exist everywhere in developed and developing countreies as well. After a definition founded on social economy principles, the paper gives the historical background of mutual...

International standard classifications were built to simplify the complex world of the business sector and analyse the international exchange of goods. Therefore they are less fitted to the classification of social economy organizations(SEO) and provision of services. Firstly this chapter...

This article aims to investigate the multiple meanings of "économie sociale" ("social economy"), a term which first appeared in France at the founding moment of modern capitalism, both as a concept in the framework for the creation of a social science in close relation with the tradition of...

This article aims to investigate the multiple meanings of "économie sociale" ("social economy"), a term which first appeared in France at the founding moment of modern capitalism, both as a concept in the framework for the creation of a social science in close relation with the tradition of...

Douglass North, along with Ronald Coase and Oliver Williamson, transformed the early intuitions of new institutional economics into powerful conceptual and analytical tools that spawned a robust base of empirical research. NIE arose in response to questions not well explained by standard...

New Institutional Economics, based on the Coasean comparative approach, offers a highly useful framework for research on environmental problems. We propose a tentative analytic framework for environmental problems and we try its heuristic power by first applying it to the Poitou-Charentes...

This article starts from the limits of the policies that assume a significant de-connection between antipoverty strategies and the logic of the growth regime and that mainly rely upon market mechanisms. By contrast, a branch of the new institutional economics argues that a complete set of...

Theories of justice in the spirit of Rawls and Harsanyi argue that fair-minded people should aspire to make choices for society as if in the original position, that is, behind a veil of ignorance that prevents them from knowing their own social positions in society. In this paper, we provide a...

Sonenshein based his Sensmaking-Intuition Model of ethical decision on a critical approach the rational models. In his model, sens-making for the ethical issue construction and the intuitive process of decision are the central articulations. But the model doesn't give a clear definition of...

Theories of justice in the spirit of Rawls and Harsanyi argue that fair-minded people should aspire to make choices for society as if in the original position, that is, behind a veil of ignorance that prevents them from knowing their own social positions. In this paper, we provide a fairly...