This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.
Lack of progress in the area of global sustainable development and difficulties in crisis management highlight the need to transform the economy and find new ways of making society more resilient. The social economy is increasingly recognized as a driver of such transformations; it comprises traditional forms of cooperative or solidarity-based organizations alongside new phenomena such as impact investing or social tech ventures that aim to contribute to the public good. Social Economy Science provides the first comprehensive analysis of why and how social economy organizations create superior value for society. The book draws on organizational theory and transition studies to provide a systematic perspective on complex multi-stakeholder forms of action. It discusses the social economy's role in promoting innovation for impact, as well as its role as an agent of societal change and as a partner to businesses, governments, and citizens.
Gorgi Krlev is Associate Professor of Sustainability at ESCP Business School in Paris. He also holds a Visiting Professorship at the Politecnico di Milano and a Visiting Fellow position at Kellogg College, University of Oxford. In his research he deals with social entrepreneurship, social innovations, and impact. His work has won numerous awards, including a best book award from the Academy of Management's Public and Nonprofit Division, the Roman Herzog Institute's 2021 Award for innovative contributions to the social market economy, and the International Society for Third Sector Research's 2022 policy impact award.
Dominika Wruk is Assistant Professor for Sustainable Entrepreneurship at the University of Mannheim. She has been leading the platforms2share research group, focussed on platform cooperatives and funded by the German Ministry for Education and Research, for several years. She led the i-share project consortium, in which she was also responsible for analysing the social, ecological, and economic effects of the sharing economy. She has also held a position as a SCANCOR Visiting Researcher at Stanford University.
Giulio Pasi is a member of the Advisory Board of the Bureau of Entrepreneurial Finance at the University of Turin and Professor of Economics at the Universidad Loyola in Seville. He has served as Scientific Officer at the European Commission Joint Research Centre, leading the work on social innovation, new financial engineering, and the relationships between public policy and new markets or industries, as well as the impact of digital transformation. He is the author of about 60 publications and is a globally recognized expert in the field of impact investing. He has been a keynote speaker at events organized by the OECD, the World Economic Forum, and the Global Steering Group on Impact Investing (former G8-taskforce).
Marika Bernhard is Sustainability Lead at DFL (German Football League). She is also the founder and chairwoman of Social Entrepreneurship Baden-Württemberg (SocEnt BW), a network organization supporting impact driven ventures across Germany. She initiated the Social Innovation Summit, which after many years of running successfully as an entrepreneurial endeavour, merged existing efforts and partnerships, including with the European Commission, to become the Social Economy Science Conference in 2021.
