The diversity of the European social enterprise sector : an evolutionary perspective

Several in-depth analyses of social entrepreneurship in Europe reveal significant differences in the way it has developed (Hazenberg et al., 2016). The EFESEIIS project supports this notion, as do other European projects, such as SIMPACT (Debref et al., 2015) and SEFORIS (SEFORIS, 2016). In many cases, national differences are explained by referring to contextual information (Svensson, 2015), including resources, institutions, economic objectives, social needs, political objectives, and governance (Terstriep et al., 2015). Indeed, Terstriep and his peers (2015) state that very few projects engage in network analysis, which is often a significant part of Social Innovation Biographies or narrative approaches. Until now, the system analysis perspective has not been used as a means of analyzing the interaction between social enterprises (SEs) and their environments