Centre for Social Economy
University of Liège
Belgium
www.ces.ulg.ac.be
About the Centre
Founded in the early 1990s by Prof. Jacques Defourny, the Centre for Social Economy gathers more or less ten full time researchers (in addition to doctoral students and visiting fellows).
It pursues three major goals:
- to develop research in the social economy, from the points of view of economic analysis, management and law;
- to support, through its work, teaching in the area of the social economy at the University of Liège and elsewhere;
- to offer third sector organizations (especially federations bodies and the community at large) services based on its expertise.
Major Education Initiatives
Social Economy Seminar
The goal of this course is to make the realities of the third sector of the social economy better known and to make their specificities better understood, both in developed and developing countries.
The third sector mainly brings together enterprises of the co-operative movements, mutual organisations and activities with an economic relevance carried out by non-profit organisations (in the Belgian context, "ASBL" and de facto associations). In order to apprehend these realities, whose importance is generally strongly undervalued, five main analytical frameworks are exploited in a complementary way:
1) those based on the notion of "non-profit organization" (NPO), about which many theoretical and empirical works have been published since the second half of the 1970s;
2) those based on the concept of "social economy";
3) the French approach of the “solidarity based economy”;
4) the concept of “non market activities”, widely used in Belgium;
5) the recent theoretical and empirical work about the emerging concept of social concept (EMES European Research Network)
Entrepreneurship and Management in the Social Economy
The course of Entrepreneuriat et management en économie sociale (Entrepreneurship and management in the social economy) is ensured by the Cera Chair.
It aims:
- to improve the knowledge of the social economy (organisations: NGOs, associations, co-operatives, companies with a social purpose; and activities: alternative finance, fair trade, development co-operation, social action, social and occupational integration, recycling and waste management, community health, leisure, culture, etc.);
- to highlight the specificities of management in social economy enterprises; and
- to offer tools adapted to entrepreneurship and management in this sector.
PhD Seminar
Advanced theories of the economy and non-profit organisations:
Since the end of the 1970s, economists have been interested in the “raisons d'être” of socio-economic organisations whose logics differ from those of for-profit private enterprises and public organisations. Various trends can be distinguished around this question: the US-based literature which focuses on “non-profit organisations”; the more European literature whose works mainly focus on the social and solidarity-based economy; and finally analytical frameworks which are more directly rooted in the study of grass-roots organisations in developing countries around concepts such as the informal sector, the popular economy, NGOs, etc. The goal of this seminar is to analyse a set of contributions in each of these main schools in order to better grasp their respective contributions to the socio-economic analysis of this type of organisations.
Major Research Projects
Social enterprise
Conceptual and theoretical approaches of the social enterprise
The notion of social enterprise, practically unknown until the 1990s, is used more and more frequently in a growing number of countries. The EMES European Research Network carried out a pioneering work by proposing a first inventory of these emerging realities throughout Europe and by developing a grid of analysis which can be used at the international level (Borzaga, C. & Defourny, J., 2001). That seminal book served as a basis for a second major European research project which lasted from 2002 to 2005: a more in depth empirical and theoretical analysis was carried out by EMES on work integration social enterprises. It resulted in a second book (M. Nyssens, 2006) also published by Routledge.
The aim now is to follow the evolutions of this new "social entrepreneurship" and of its conceptualisations, both in the member-states of the EU (with a specific focus on the UK and its "social enterprises") and in Central and Eastern Europe, North America and Far East Asia.
Cera Chair
Cera Chair on "Entrepreneurship and Management in the Social Economy"
In the framework of the Cera Chair, development of a university-level pedagogical support taking into account the adaptations of the classical tools of management (financial management, human resources management, marketing, governance) to the social economy and to co-operatives.
In the framework of the Centre of expertise in entrepreneurship set up by Cera in April 2006, quantitative and qualitative surveys of co-operative societies in the social economy (under the direction of HIVA's Steunpunt Cooperatief Ondernemen).
Non-profit and non-market sectors
Analysis of the non-profit and non-market sectors in Wallonia and Brussels
This program includes a series of specific studies on the non-profit sector and constitutes a kind of interface between, on the one hand, institutions having data and information on associations (non-profit organisations, or NPOs) – namely the National Bank of Belgium, the National Office of Social Security, research centres… - and, on the other hand, actors from the civil society and the political sphere who need a clear and coherent vision of the sector.
The program also involves the development of tools aiming to disseminate the research results: information material for the public, diffusion of documentation within education and training networks, websites...