Exploring The Social Enterprises: A New Business Model

The two main themes in today's society "economic development and social development" are faced with the pressures and challenges. By the end of 2008 the hit of financial crisis made a lot of bankers and business giants starting to close their business or at least cut jobs, the situation leads to the re-shuffling along of the financial and political structure. Actually the crisis-affected is more than just rich people; the civilians witnessed the loss of great wealth as well, on the top of that they experienced the tremendous impact to their own lives by the unemployment and social welfare down. In the meantime the three sectors, government (public), private (for-profit) and third sector(non-profit), which ones were divided clearly before started to rethink over about is it necessary to reline the relationship between business profitability and social development? In this process one new, even in the international area, concept and practice -"social enterprise"and"social entrepreneur"is getting unprecedented attention.However what are social enterprises and social entrepreneurs? Is the non-Profit sector, which one represents welfare and charitable in the traditional sense, really jumping into the "money's arms" and turning to profit-making to solve social problem? Those business giants, who seek maximum profits always as their exclusive target, are really realizing today's free market economy is the root cause of leading to the serious gap between rich and poor and pollution problems, and etc? Is there difference between "social enterprise" and "corporate social responsibility"? How can the social enterprises, which the newest economic body, take into account the marketing of services and products, when they do the marketing of social values? How do the other countries put the social enterprises into practice? Whether there already is this kind of corporation model which one full of "western style" in China now? If the answer is yes, how do these domestic social enterprises and social entrepreneurs to operate the concepts and entities personally and practically?In order to answer the above questions, in the one hand this article will explain at the macro level the concept of social enterprises and introduce the relevant experience and policies in a number of countries, while analyzing the current development of social enterprises in China through case interviews; on the other hand this article will specify at the micro level the similarities and differences between social enterprises marketing and commercial enterprises marketing through concrete examples, which is the biggest weakness of social enterprise. Finally, the author proposed comments on the development of social enterprise in China. The whole paper can be summarized as "one concept, what is social enterprises; two origins, the representative of the United Kingdom to solve employment problem and reduce the burden of services by social enterprises, and the representative of the United States to solve social problems by promoting innovative ; three models, there are three kinds of social enterprise development model recently in China, and four partnership, which means different roles and responsibilities of government, NPO, business and the society in the way of promoting the development of social enterprises in China"...