Beyond Corporate Social Responsibility: The Social Enterprise

"The social enterprise is the correctional mechanism of the globalized world" - said Mihaly Karacsony upon introducing the new act on social co-operatives (Karacsony [2007]), whilst the daily Vilaggazdasag called them, in its issue of 26 July 2007. the „conscience of capitalism”. A decade after the first trials in the USA, the notion of a social enterprise – with the help of the media – has become part of governmental policy in both the US and the UK. Today we may state that social enterprises are part of the Hungarian initiatives, too. In the past few years we could observe several initiatives in Hungary the goal of which was to make the social enterprise a commonly known and practiced notion. The social role and the economic importance of such enterprises is not yet considerable in Hungary, but certain examples suggest that there are huge reserves of resource in this field. CECOP , the Brussels-based European Confederation of Workers’ Co-operatives, Social Co-operatives and Participative Enterprises conducted a survey amongst organisations of the not-for-profit sector.