Social Enterprises, Benefit Corporations and Community Interest Companies: The UK Landscape

Abstract

The present chapter deals with the social enterprises’ landscape in the United Kingdom, with emphasis on certified B corps, benefit corporations and community interest companies (CIC). Although the United Kingdom has the reputation of a jurisdiction that supports the shareholder value maximisation paradigm, it has introduced special rules for social enterprises and has facilitated the development of benefit corporations and B corps. The UK experience may be significantly different from the United States’ one, but it can operate as a roadmap for countries that aim at becoming more inclusive in terms of corporate social responsibility and social purpose.

Social enterprise growth by design: using design to incubate and accelerate social enterprises

“…For instance, the UK Government has tended to focus on creating legal forms (i.e. the Community Interest Company), public service marketplaces and growing the social impact investment market rather than providing direct financial support to social enterprises (Andreadkis, 2022;Hazenberg and Hall, 2016;Mazzei and Roy, 2017;SEUK, 2022), while the South Korean Government gives both national and local governments responsibility for cultivating new markets for social enterprises and providing them with direct financial support (Choi et al, 2020). Importantly, the two countries demonstrate different degrees of design utilisation in their business contexts.…”