What Are Social Enterprises?

Social enterprises are social mission driven organizations which trade in goods or services for a social purpose. The need to deliver on financial, social and environmental performance targets is often referred to as having a triple bottom line.

It could be that the profit (or surplus) from the business is used to support related or unrelated social aims (as in a charity shop), or that the business itself accomplishes the social aim through its operation, say through the employment of people from a disadvantaged community including individuals and existing business who have difficulty in securing investment from banks and mainstream lenders.

Social enterprise is a relatively new term for a type of business that has existed for at least a century. The term social enterprise relates to social entrepreneur, the name originally given to 19th century philanthropic businessmen and industrialists, who had genuine concern for the welfare of their employees. Today, its use varies in different regions. In Britain, the focus is on the use of the surplus as the defining characteristic. In North America, there is less emphasis on generating a surplus and more on the double bottom line nature of the enterprise. European usage tends to add the criterion of social rather than individual ownership.

Social enterprises are generally held to comprise the more businesslike end of the spectrum of organizations that make up the third sector or social economy. A commonly-cited rule of thumb is that at least half their income is derived from trading rather than from subsidy or donations.

The Nobel Prize

The Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded annually, since 1901, to an writer from any country who has, in the words from the will of Alfred Nobel, produced "the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency". The "work" in this case refers to an author's work as a whole, though individual works are sometimes also cited. The Swedish Academy decides who, if anyone will obtain the prize in any given year and announces the name of the chosen laureate in early October. Nobel's choice of importance on "idealistic" or "ideal" in his criteria for the Nobel Prize in Literature has led to recurrent controversy. In the original Swedish, the word idealisk can be translated as either "idealistic" or "ideal". In the early twentieth century, the Nobel Committee interpreted the intent of the will strictly and did not award definite world-renowned authors of the time such as Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen and Henry James. More recently, the wording has been interpreted more generously, and the Prize is awarded both for lasting literary merit and for proof of consistent idealism on some important level, most recently a kind of idealism championing human rights on a large scale, and hence more political, some would argue.

"The highlight of the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony in Stockholm is when each Nobel Laureate steps forward to receive the prize from the hands of His magnificence the King of Sweden. Under the eyes of a watching world, the Nobel Laureate receives three things: a diploma, a medal and a document confirming the prize amount". In 2007 the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Doris Lessing, an English citizen of the United Kingdom, cited as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny"; she receives a prize amount of 10,000,000 SEK (slightly more than €1 million, or US$1.4 million). The Swedish Academy has involved major criticism in recent years. Some compete that many famous writers have not been awarded the prize or even been nominated, whereas others contend that others, who are already well known, do not deserve it. There have also been controversies involving alleged political interests relating to the nomination process and final selection of some of the recent literary Laureates.