Social Enterprise and Employment in the United Kingdom

I’ve just had a new article published in Perspectives on Work, the journal of the Labor and Employment Relations Association in the USA.

In the article, I give a brief overview of the Social Enterprise sector in the UK and comment on the impacts of social enterprise on economic development and, specifically, job creation.  The main points that I make are that:

• Many social enterprises operate at the margins of the labour market, so their impacts on general unemployment caused by the economic crisis and industrial restructuring are not always significant
• The barriers to becoming a social entrepreneur are no less high than to becoming an entrepreneur in the private sector.
• Some of the most important lessons to be learnt from social enterprises are:

1. How to support marginalised individuals and groups into the workforce
2. How to involve employees in firm decision-making
3. How to grow businesses whilst devoting a higher than average proportion of turnover to wages, training and development.