The Institutions of Livelihood and Social Enterprise Systems

This paper considers resource coordination as a problem of allocation and distribution of resources in organisations pursuing social aims, or social enterprises (SEs). These goals are close to the Polanyian idea of the primacy of society over self-regulating markets and to reciprocity as mechanism of coordination of the economic activity that is different from both market exchange and redistribution. We ask what the specificities of organisations that pursue social aims are, and what coordination mechanisms underpin their production. The premise is that individuals are driven by plural motivations, including pro-social motivations besides self-interested ones, thus requiring a plurality of coordination mechanisms. SEs make principal use of cooperative pacts based on norms of reciprocity, but include also market exchanges and state-led coordination, both at organisational and systemic levels. Specific institutional solutions in support of cooperation and reciprocity, including asset distribution, surplus accumulation, redistribution, and multi-stakeholding are considered.