Cooperative social entrepreneurship: reflections on a decade embedding cooperative studies in social enterprise courses

The rise of social enterprise (SE) offers significant opportunities for cooperative education and cooperative social entrepreneurship (CSE). Internationally, the impulse for SE arose out of changing attitudes to charity trading, sustainable development and the cooperative movement. In England, it has specifically cooperative origins dating back to 1979 at Beechwood College (Leeds). By the 1990s, worker cooperatives and their development agencies were collaborating to create the first SE support organisation and regional agency. Up to 2002, SE was tightly integrated with cooperative development. After 2002, it was reframed following a consultation on community interest company legislation to align with charity and public-sector reform plans. I examine how CSE expresses a more mutual commitment to integrating and extending the application of cooperative values and principles into a wider range of SEs, with an emphasis on solidarity between stakeholders, explicit social aims and multi-stakeholder design principles. In doing so, CSE gives more active consideration to the interests of labour, the local community and wider society in the design and development of cooperative enterprises.