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There is a growing perception that social enterprises represent a significant solution to the range of contemporary challenges facing rural areas across Europe. However, while much of the existing studies of European rural social enterprises provide a rich insight into specific case studies, as of yet, there is no comprehensive review of the breadth of research currently published on rural social enterprises in Europe. We respond to this gap by providing a systematic literature review incorporating 66 studies of rural social enterprise in Europe. We highlight the range of research in this field and demonstrate how the organisations act as key actors in fulfilling needs of rural areas that are not met otherwise. This systematic literature review confirms that rural social enterprises are characterised by strong local involvement with an ability to combine different goals and resources. Based on this review, we suggest that the rural and local contexts, often combined with tailored external support, are important factors in enabling rural social enterprises. This review also indicates that the academic field is relatively young and rapidly growing, leaving room for new lines of potential research to improve our understanding of these enterprises and their contribution to the development of rural places.

One particular field of Social Enterprise – WISEs or Work Integration Social Enterprises – has become increasingly recognised as being emblematic of the dynamics of social enterprises and now constitutes a major sphere of their activity globally. From their early roots, focusing on providing productive activity for the blind and those with other physical and/or intellectual disabilities, WISEs are pioneers in promoting the integration of excluded persons through a productive activity. In recent decades, WISEs have incrementally evolved as a tool for implementing national and regional labour market policies. The papers in this special edition explore how populations of WISEs in different country contexts have emerged, and in some instances, shifted in their identities over time in relation to changing national or regional public policies. This special issue is part of the ICSEM project, a worldwide research project aiming to identify, analyze and compare social enterprise models across countries, regions and fields. The special issue features five country specific analyses from the first stage of the ICSEM project where researchers focusing on WISEs examined the policy environment surrounding WISEs and the heterogeneity of the organizational WISE models that have emerged in different contexts: Ireland, the United States, Japan, Austria and Switzerland.

Rural shrinking is an ongoing phenomenon in many parts of Europe. Against this backdrop neo-endogenous rural development has been gaining support as a conceptual and policy approach which stress the combination of local and external actors, resources and forces for enhancing an integrated development of rural areas. Within this governance framework rural social enterprises have been stressed as potential key actors contributing to rural development. This paper explores, through 36 semi-structured interviews with diverse stakeholders of two Irish community-based rural social enterprises, the role of these organizations in contributing to a neoendogenous development. Our findings show how their mobilization of the social attachment of their members, their collective character and their delivery of tangible results have been key to develop collaborative dynamics with stakeholders from different sectors and situated at various spatial scales. Moreover, these organizations have accommodated global-exogenous forces buffering their effects through locally-focused solutions which address the needs of their rural communities, despite their incapacity to address the causes of these global-exogenous trends. We conclude that rural community-based social enterprises can play a relevant role in contributing to neo-endogenous development, however, institutional frameworks that address the diversity of rural areas and that enhance balanced collaborations among different rural development stakeholders are a precondition to unlock their potential.