Samenvatting

Social enterprises received growing attention since the financial crisis started in 2008, due to severe public sector cut backs and the inability of current structures and policies to meet social problems. This development has also been accelerated by the dissatisfaction of consumers and society in private and public institutions. In general, society has become more critical of the conventional approach of doing business. Thus, attention has been drawn on the significant scaling social enterprises can have on social change.

The thesis takes an explorative approach and aims to identify the main challenges of scaling up in social entrepreneurship. For that reason, the thesis explores first the efforts and current legislative actions on the European, national and local level in order to provide an understanding of the support mechanisms for the social enterprise sector. Secondly, the thesis makes use of qualitative data on the current patterns of social enterprises at the local level, which is based on an analysis of case studies of three different types of social enterprises in The Hague. Interviews were conducted with three social entrepreneurs in order to receive empirical insights of existing initiatives. The analysis identifies the main start-up and scaling up challenges of social enterprises on the local level, which can add important knowledge for the social enterprise sector in the Netherlands and other parties involved in this area.

The outcomes contribute to a wider understanding of how these challenges identified can be addressed and minimized by implementing top-down policy support or bottom-up initiatives. The research concludes that social enterprises should be initiated by conscious entrepreneurs and communities that embody a social role in a certain locality. For that reason, social enterprises are bottom-up initiatives as they are self-organised by citizen’s groups that have managed to create new initiatives and especially, in the early stages without significant help from the public sector or other actors. Nevertheless, social enterprises and intermediate organisations have emphasised on mobilising other parties such as local authorities, national governments, and European institutions to provide more financial and legal support and accelerate the scaling for this sector.

Future research would benefit from the collection of additional data on the role of intermediate organisation, since the research shows that intermediate organisations embody the role of advocates for the social enterprise sector. This data could bring more relevant information to solve the challenges identified in this research.