We are very pleased to announce the 3rd EMES-Polanyi International Seminar, which will be hosted by EMES' institutional member, Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Roskilde University (RUC), Denmark, from 16-17 April 2018. The event is co-organized by COST through the EMPOWER-SE Action.  

The title ‘Welfare societies in transition – Polanyi revisited through the lens of welfare state, social democracy and solidarity economy" already draws attention to the focus of contributions sought: the role of civil society and citizen-driven initiatives in times of retreating mass oriented solidarity through public redistribution, new or desirable relationships between collective action and public institutions to address social inequalities, and the promotion of a new socio-economic paradigms that foster freedom and achieve the inclusion of diverse groups within the framework of the nation state. Read more.

Event hashtag: #3EMESPolanyi

After five successful editions of the EMES PhD Summer Schools, in France, Denmark, Italy, Romania, and the United Kingdom; we’re returning to France for this 6th edition. From the 19th through the 22nd of June 2018, we’ll be near Marseille hosted by EMES' institutional member LEST (a Mixed Research Unit of the CNRS and of the Aix-Marseille University), to host a Training School entitled “Social enterprises and research methods: Qualitative methods, mixed methods and international comparisons”.

This will be a special edition for many reasons but mainly because it will be a COST training school as a result of its inclusion in the EMPOWER-SE Action as well as a CNRS summer school. This is, without doubt, a winning alliance, which we hope will enable an interesting mix of emerging researchers to participate. The goal is to offer them an opportunity to exchange on their ongoing research and learn from more established colleagues.

Some 150 students and 70 researchers from over 35 countries have participated in these unique learning events. PhDs constitute a central part of EMES as shown by the special membership category for PhD students, the seat reserved for PhD students in the EMES Board of Directors, the EMES Junior Experts Blog (EJEB), and other concrete outputs.

Hashtag: #6EMESschool

Last June, EMES won the COST Action “Empowering the next generation of social enterprise scholars” (EMPOWER-SE). The main aim is address existing fragmentation in the levels of knowledge regarding social enterprises, from both a geographical and a disciplinary point of view, as well as from the perspective of different categories of stakeholders. Social enterprises are organizations which combine an entrepreneurial dynamic to provide services or goods with a primacy of social aims. Social enterprises naturally cross various types of borders; sectoral (public, business, cooperatives, associations), resources (drawing them from the market, public procurement, grants, and philanthropy) and activity fields (personal services, finance, recycling industry, energy and transport, food supply chains...).

EMPOWER-SE aims at: 
(1) contributing to a comprehensive understanding of the diversity of SE models emerging across Europe and globally; their conditions of emergence and development; and their contribution to key industries for the development of sustainable societies by overcoming existing fragmentation in the levels of knowledge from both a geographical and a disciplinary point of view;
(2) empowering the next generation of SE scholars, focusing on expanding the SE scientific community to less research-intensive countries where it is still embryonic or non-existing; and
(3) fostering evidence-based policy from local to European levels and supporting the development of SE and their eco-systems in synergy with main industry representatives and stakeholders.

A total of 35 countries are now formally part of the management body of this project (the “Management Committee” or MC) plus 10 near-neighbouring countries and international partner countries. The first meeting of the MC was held on the 27th of November at the premises of COST, in Brussels. Over 50 researchers from the 35 countries represented in the Action came to learn about how EMPOWER-SE will, in the upcoming four years, overcome fragmentation at the level of social enterprises knowledge. By “fragmentation” we mean both from a geographical and a disciplinary point of view, as well as from the perspective of different categories of stakeholders.

 

Last July, two new institutional members joined EMES. They introduced themselves in the course of the annual EMES General Assembly, held right after the 6th EMES International Research Conference in Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium). The two new institutional members are:

More coming soon on our two brand new members...

Last August, the Journal of Entrepreneurial and Organizational Diversity (JEOD) launched a call for papers for a special issue on “Social innovation in Social enterprises: What is going on?”. The submission deadline of this call has been extended to December 17th, 2017, due to popular request.

The publication of the special issue is planned to be published on July 2018. Submissions will undergo a double blind, peer review process. Full manuscripts shall be submitted via the journal website. Please direct any further inquiries to the issue’s guest-editors: Simone Poledrini (University of Perugia), Florence Degavre (Université Catholique de Louvain), and Ermanno Tortia (University of Trento and Euricse), or to the editorial office (jeod@euricse.eu).