Founded in the early 1990s by Prof. Jacques Defourny, the Centre for Social Economy (Centre d’Economie Sociale – CES) pursues three major goals:
- to develop research in the areas of social enterprise/entrepreneurship and the social economy, mainly from the perspectives of economics, management and organization theory, sociology and law;
- to support, through its work, teaching in the area of social entrepreneurship and the social economy at the University of Liège and elsewhere, for Bachelor, Master and Doctoral students, as well as for practitioners in the area;
- to offer the community and private and public decision-makers services based on its expertise.
Within HEC Management School, University of Liege, the Centre for Social Economy coordinates the “Social Enterprise and the Social Economy” peak of excellence. Research projects cover a wide range of conceptual (definitions), statistical (measurement) and more focused empirical work testing and building theory around social enterprise and the social economy. Using quantitative and/or qualitative methodologies, research questions are explored at the global level as well as in particular subfields of social enterprise such as culture, environment and energy, health, education, work integration, fair trade, etc. These research projects are led by 3 Professors, 10 PhD students and 2 post-doc researchers from Belgium and abroad. From 2012 to 2017, the CES coordinates a major “Inter-University Attraction Pole” (IAP) research program on social enterprise funded by the Belgian Science Policy and titled “If not for profit, for what? And how?”.
Besides research, the Centre for Social Economy organizes two teaching programs. At the Master’s level, since 2010, the “Management of Social Enterprises” orientation trains some fifteen students per year during the two years of the Master in Management Sciences. At the practitioners level, an executive education program was started in 2012 for managers and entrepreneurs in the field.
Three Chairs within the CES contribute to teaching and research in management and entrepreneurship related to social enterprise and the social economy, namely the “Cera Chair in Social Entrepreneurship” (Prof. Sybille Mertens), the “SRIW-Sowecsom Chair in Social Enterprise Management” (Prof. Benjamin Huybrechts) and the newly born “Baillet-Latour Chair in Social Investment and Philanthropy”
Since 1996, the CES has co-founded and hosted the Coordination Unit of the EMES European Research Network, which includes 13 research centres throughout the European Union and individual researchers specialised in the field of social entreprise and related issues (social and solidarity economy, non-profit organisations, third sector, etc.). The EMES Network, which has been registered as a non-profit organisation (AISBL) under Belgian law since 2002, was chaired by Jacques Defourny until 2010. The next edition of the EMES Research Conference on Social Enterprise will be organized in Liege (July 2013) in collaboration with the CES and the IAP research program.
