Competing for Social Profits: The Case of Econocare
(2023) 34th SASE Annual Meeting — Location: University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. (9.July.2023)
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- Economic research on social enterprise tend to focus on a distinction between for profit and not for profit enterprise. “For profits” enterprise referring to capitalistic enterprise and “not for profit” being other type of organizations such as associations and NGOs. Of course, with this distinction, we are missing other economic organizations such as workers’ cooperatives, but we are also missing social enterprise that uses profit generating endeavor to finance their social activity. Functionally, they are competing on the market to generate what we would call social profit: profit used to finance their social activities. Such is the case of Econocare. Econocare is a social enterprise that operates thrift stores in Brussels and Wallonia with a large-scale collecting operation and sorting plant associated. The profit generated from its economic activities is affected to its social activities which revolves around sheltering homeless people and organizing a network of social services to allow their beneficiaries getting back on their feet. Defourny and Nyssen (2019) refer to this kind of social enterprise as an “associative entrepreneurial model”, where non-profit association put together commercial activities in order to finance their social work. It can also be considered as « Work integration social enterprise » (Defourny & Nyssens, 2006) since working the economic activities of the enterprise is considered an integral part of the beneficiaries’ process of reintegration into society. Thus, more than a third of the people involved in the economic activities are homeless people or people on the verge of precarity. If some of their work is mostly in support of full-time workers, many find their way into the training and requalification schemes organized by the firm. In many ways, this experiment is interesting since it corresponds to most principles defended by The paper uses Amartya Sen’s (1999) capability approach to interpret the democratic potential of this experiment in light of its potential in the development of economic and democratic capabilities for precarious people and workers. This is in line with other papers in the field of industrial relations that also studies the capability-enhancing potential of employment regulations and institutional features of the system of employment relations (Bonvin, 2012; De Munck & Ferreras, 2013; Subramanian & Zimmermann, 2013). This paper is based on a beginning ethnographic case study made in the context of a partnership research with Econocare. It describes the daily work life of the workers in the many sectors (social, economic and office workers) and evaluates how this enterprise, considered as an organizational experiment, contribute to better or worse work.
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Jégou, O. (2023). Competing for Social Profits: The Case of Econocare. 34th SASE Annual Meeting, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/239920