Acceso usuarios
Ignacio Bretos Fernández, Millán Díaz Foncea, Pablo Gómez Viartola, Carmen Marcuello Servós
The three traditional typologies of social enterprise in Spain have been the Insertion Companies, the Special Employment Centres and the Social Initiative Cooperatives. While the first two have been widely studied in the literature, Social Initiative Cooperatives have remained hidden in academic analysis, mainly focused on the legal perspective. This article aims to advance knowledge of Social Initiative Cooperatives, following on from the article by Bretos et al. (2020) in which they were quantified at 647 active cooperatives in 2017, making them the most relevant traditional social enterprise model in Spain. Specifically, this article explores the link between Social Initiative Cooperatives and the category of "social cooperative" that emerges in the literature in this field. To this end, we present the organisational profile of these organisations, obtained through a questionnaire to 85 Social Initiative Cooperatives (19.2% of the population) in which we asked about their management, governance and financing model, among other aspects. Based on the results of this study, it is possible to confirm the almost exact link between the Social Initiative Cooperative model and the "social cooperative" category that is recurrently offered in the literature for the reference social enterprise models.
