CZECH SOCIAL ECONOMY AND SOCIAL ENTERPRISES: CURRENT DEVELOPMENTS AND CHALLENGES

The paper describes the current developments in Czech social economy in the institutional context of Czech national economy. More generally, this paper deals with social economy and social enterprises as potential instruments for solving the crisis of the modern welfare states. Firstly, the theoretical approaches and main economic theories that define the boundaries of the "social economy space" are analysed. In this paper, social economy is explained in connection with the concept of the nonprofit sector. Those concepts are analysed and compared both on the theoretical and the practical (applied) levels. We compare the strengths and weaknesses of both the concepts, as well as the common features of those institutional sets. Differences and contradictions between theories, real-life social enterprise principles and statistical evidence are examined. In fact, we try to answer the question of how the social economy concept is related to the nonprofit sector and, on the other hand, what are the criteria that distinguish them. We introduce the basic facts concerning the Czech sector of social enterprises, as well as the Czech non-profit sector. We identify the main actors that define and influence social economy and third sector issues, describe and compare their goals, methods and power. We focus on public agencies, private non-profit and for-profit organizations, and the most important interest groups. Next, we describe particular approaches to social economy that can be identified in the Czech context. We identify the ideological sources that arise from socio-economic literature, as well as approaches and theories adopted by the academics and scholars. We also pay attention to institutions that declare themselves to be part of social economy, such as social enterprises. Typical representatives of social economy are analysed, and special attention is paid to organizations employing mentally or physically handicapped people. A separate part of the paper is dedicated to a traditional part of social economy - the cooperatives. Czech cooperatives used to play an important role in the socioeconomic life of Czech society in the era of so called First Czechoslovak Republic (1918-1939), but the history of Czech cooperatives is richer and older. Unfortunately, the communist regime completely destroyed the main principles of cooperatives, such as voluntary and open membership, democratic member control, member economic participation, autonomy and independence, etc. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989 cooperatives of all kinds re-emerged and they create a very interesting part of Czech economy. A great deal of them, however, are far from the initial ideas of the cooperative movement. The very often behave as traditional for-profit companies with no positive "social" overlap.