The reconciliation between economic and social in the notion of social enterprise: limits and possibilities (in the Brazilian context)

Abstract The text aims to highlight different attributes related to the concept of social enterprise, to contribute to the specification of possible uses. It starts from the following question: what notions qualify the variety of meanings attributed to practices linked to the expression social enterprise? The notion of social enterprise derives from the questioning about the limits of exclusively economic, monetary-based initiatives, regarding the capacity to respond to social demands, it represents, to a certain extent, the resurgence of experiences that mobilize varied purposes between economic and social logic. However, the extension of the notion of social enterprises in the world has been open to different and even conflicting interpretations, between an Anglo-Saxon version, a classic European version and a Latin American and a renewed European version (Laville, Young & Eynaud, 2014). It is under such bias that the term may occur, in different contexts, as social business, third sector, social economy or solidarity economy, as we have pointed out here.