Essential Social Enterprise

Social Enterprise is a worldwide movement of alternative organisational and business models, but it is sometimes difficult to know precisely the meaning of the term. In Essential Social Enterprise, Freer Spreckley traces the origin and development of social enterprise and shows how, over time, both the term and values have been altered and sometimes misinterpreted. The book praises the growth of supplementary and essential initiatives that widen the support for social enterprise influencing traditional business infrastructure mechanisms. The best known is the triple bottom line of Profit, People and Planet that has become the default criteria for corporate social responsibility. The book’s central thesis is that it is excellent to see the growth of complementary social tools and different social enterprise applications, but questions whether these are displacement activities avoiding essential system change to corporate ownership and control. The book argues that the original ideas of social enterprise are urgently needed now. We should go beyond the pleasantries of putting the word ‘social’ in the title and assuming that means change. Freer puts forward a convincing, clear and radical interpretation in defining Social Enterprise and argues that it is a powerful solution to some of today’s problems. These, he suggests, are inequality, environmental degradation, poverty and the fetish of exclusivity and puts forward the solutions of a common ownership entity, governed democratically, with integrated financial, social and ecological guiding principles and combined performance measurement indicators and a planning and evaluation method. The book suggests these changes are of our time and urgently need to be applied by organisations and businesses to create system change and avert a social and environmental decline. Furthermore, Freer argues that organisations need to be regenerative, going beyond sustainability and reversing the tread of societal inequality and ecological catastrophe in how they are owned and controlled, operate and behave. The book proposes that governments worldwide enact legislation to create a ‘Social Enterprise Act’ to define and hasten new organisations and enterprises to help regenerate society and the environment.