Reciprocity Principle As The Foundation For Social Economy Manifestation

Social economy appears as a bilateral impulse that gathers potential customers and professionals who secure the demand and the supply for services. Therefore, needs turn from individual to collective and allow the persons involved to identify new needs and to respond to them by mobilizing public or voluntary resources. A social enterprise interacts both with market and public sector when operating in complex areas where the state is involved. Once established, they tend to form a hybrid economic model in which the commercial activities (self-financed by selling goods or performing services), non-market but monetary (public financing, donations from churches and foundations) and non-market ones (voluntary work of its members or others) combine. The ability to gather various forms of economic activity in an entrepreneurial framework as well as the ability to engage customers and service performers in a democratic decision making process, based on reciprocity principle, offers a regulatory role to social economy. Reciprocity as an economic principle ensures the main instrument to distinguish what is essential and constant regarding social economy from what is secondary and transitory. Reciprocity enables the manifestation of the practices and economic resources mobilization forms with the scope of satisfying human needs that do not belong to profit seeking organizations nor to the public institutions.