We are very happy to announce that, thanks to the support of the Chaire Économie Sociale et Solidaire of Le Mans University (France), the book Social Enterprise in Asia, edited by long-standing EMES members Eric Bidet and Jacques Defourny,  is now available in Open Access—which means that all four books in the ICSEM series are now available in Open Access! This is a wonderful piece of news, which we are both delighted and proud to share.

The other three books in the series—namely Social Enterprise in Western Europe, Social Enterprise in Central and Eastern Europe and Social Enterprise in Latin America—had already been made available in Open Access (with the support of the Empower-SE COST Action 16206 for the two “European” books).

All four ICSEM books are based on the “International Comparative Social Enterprise Models” (ICSEM) Project, which involved more than 200 researchers from 55 countries from 2013 to 2020. In the last two decades, the quest for a widely accepted definition of social enterprise has been a central issue in a great number of publications; the main objective of the ICSEM Project was to show that the social enterprise field would benefit much more from linking conceptualisation efforts to the huge diversity of social enterprises than from an additional and ambitious attempt at providing an encompassing definition. Starting from a hypothesis that could be termed “the impossibility of a unified definition”, the ICSEM research strategy relied on bottom-up approaches to capture the social enterprise phenomenon in its local and national contexts. This strategy made it possible to consider and give legitimacy to locally embedded approaches while simultaneously allowing for identifying major social enterprise models to delineate the field on common grounds at the international level. The four volumes in the series constitute a key reference and resource for teachers, researchers, students, experts, policymakers, journalists and others who want to acquire a broad understanding of the phenomena of social enterprise and social entrepreneurship as they emerge and develop across the world.

Posts about various chapters of the four books have been published in the past months on the EMES blog. The series was launched in late April 2021 with the Bulgarian post and now also includes posts about Croatia; Argentina; the Czech Republic; Cambodia; Brazil; Germany; Georgia; Latvia; Hungary; Japan; Norway; Italy; Mexico; the Netherlands; Peru; Lithuania; the Philippines; China; Switzerland; and transversal analyses about Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands; social enterprises and agricultural value chains in South-East Asia; social enterprise in rural areas in the Baltic states; endogenous and exogenous drivers in the development of the social enterprise sector in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; and religious influences on social enterprise in Cambodia, Malaysia and South Korea. With this blog series, “One Day, One Team, One Chapter…” and discover the faces behind the authors’ names!

Good news should also come soon about the ICSEM website, which had been temporarily suspended because of its transfer to the EMES website, so STAY TUNED! 😊