Testing Social Enterprise Models Across the World: Evidence from the “International Comparative Social Enterprise Models (ICSEM) Project

The comparative analysis of social enterprise (SE) models lacks strongly integrated theoretical foundations and empirical surveys that would allow for statistically testing typologies of SE models at the international level. This paper aims to address the lack of a scientifically robust typology of SE models by providing an analysis rooted in some of the strongest theoretical and analytical frameworks focusing on the third sector’s identity, allowing for a wide diversity of SE models within the third sector and beyond its frontiers. Our typology is tested through the statistical exploitation (multiple factorial analysis followed by hierarchical cluster analysis) of a large international dataset, resulting from a survey carried out in the same way in more than 40 countries under the coordination of the authors. The existence of three of our four SE models— the social-business model, the social-cooperative model and the entrepreneurial non-profit model— is strongly supported by the empirical analysis in almost all the surveyed countries