Cooperative, Social Enterprise, and Community-Based Enterprise: Competing, Substituting, or Complementing?

Abstract

Questioning the novelty of an increasingly implemented organizational form ‘community-based enterprise (CBE)’,this paper aims to compare CBE with two existing forms, namely cooperative and social enterprise, which at a firstglance are quite similar to CBE. This paper discusses, analyzes, and compares the three forms using anorganizational perspective, including organizational goal and architecture. The three intersects to one another. Socialenterprise focuses on social goals and has a relatively broad scope of governance arrangement. Meanwhile, CBE hassimilar vibes with community cooperative, i.e. concentrating on citizen participation and aiming to provide benefitsnot only for members but also for local people in a broader sense. However, CBE has more flexible governancearrangement. If the legal form of CBE is not further developed or not offering financial advantage, then it can be agood opportunity for cooperative to expand its wings over the markets usually covered by CBE. The results of thispaper advance the CBE’s conceptual work and uncover opportunity for strategic implementation of the three forms.