Asian Social Enterprise Models in a Worldwide Perspective

It is now well acknowledged that the notion of social enterprise (SE) simultaneously emerged in North America and Western Europe and had only a very limited audience in other parts of the world, like in Asia, before 2010 or so. As shown in the introduction of this book, however, this does not mean that research initiatives did not exist to describe and analyse “non-conventional” economic initiatives and organisations in Asian countries. On the contrary, various other conceptual approaches were used to study “non-governmental organisations” (NGOs), “non-profit organisations” (NPOs), “third-sector organisations” (TSOs) or, more broadly, the “social economy”, as a large umbrella encompassing NPOs and cooperatives. Several of these works were strongly supported by international scientific networks, such as the International Society for Third-Sector Research (ISTR), which has had an Asian-Pacific regional branch since 1999. 1 The Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project (CNP), which focused on the identification and analysis of the non-profit sector worldwide, also played a critical role in some Asian countries