The first objective of the present paper is to deepen the transatlantic dialogue between social enterprise debates as embodied in their respective European and US contexts, as well as to underline distinct developments they now tend to experience. However, what seems really at stake, beyond conceptual debates, is the place and the role of social enterprise within the overall economy and its interaction with the market, the civil society and public policies.
In this perspective, our second objective is to show that re-embedding social enterprises and social entrepreneurship in their own specific contexts, with a view to achieving better mutual understanding between the European and the US schools of thought, is one of the best ways to raise issues and suggest further lines of research which do not appear clearly when sticking to specific national or regional contexts.
