Social Capital Markets, Social Enterprise, Social Innovation

The social cooperative is the opportunity for social and professional reintegration of people threatened with social exclusion:
Reintegration tool; The objectives of the social cooperative; The threefold nature of the social cooperative; Is it worth it to assume social co-operatives?

The chapter focuses on how social aims and cooperative attitudes have been supported in the shaping of networks in Scotland, and why this is relevant for the sustainable development of social enterprise and communities. From this background, our main aim is to evidence the processes whereby cooperation leading to the rise of networks of social enterprises in Scotland, have created a collective identity and revamped social capital, in order to serve their mission for the promotion of public interest. Our conclusions emphasise the centrality of social enterprise aims to the production of social capital, the role of networking in building a critical mass of social values within communities, the complementarities of other typologies of economic actors in the construction of social capital and community welfare.

Violence and conflict still continue all over the globe. Much of this violence stem from ethnic, religious and other “mental fences” that people have been educated from childhood. These boundaries and loyalties divide people in the planet. The third of the four pillars of education in the 21st century recommended by the UNESCO Delors Commission is “learning to live together” or “learning to relate.” Clearly, there is a need to come to a global consensus on what concrete actions we need to consider in overcoming these harmful and tragic boundaries. This paper explores several options towards a global action agenda in transboundary learning and innovation. Transboundary learning covers learning processes that occur across boundaries, whether political, ethnic, geographical, religious, corporate or administrative. Transboundary innovation is innovation that redefines or transcends such mental fences, boundaries and affiliations.

Three avenues of transboundary learning and innovation are explored and concrete actions are proposed under each avenue: (1) developing and application of Third Delors Technologies, (2) developing dialogue practices between religions, and (3) establishing programs to disseminate enterprise innovations. “Third Delors Technologies” is the new term proposed for those tools for helping people to “learn to live together” such as generative dialogue, training in bridging leadership and educational programs on glocality. Glocality is “thinking globally and acting locally”; it is acting locally while being informed with a broad planetary perspective. Social hostilities and physical conflicts arising from religion is increasing over the last few years. Conflict between Abrahamic religions continue to claim lives in various places in the world and even places a grave threat of nuclear war in the Middle East. The second avenue is collecting, developing and learning effective dialogue practices between religions. The enterprise is the major engine of growth in the world but its gaps and weaknesses lead to sub-optimal wealth creation and sometimes to massive wealth destruction as we had seen in the 2008 global financial crisis. The third avenue is transboundary innovation to bridge gaps in the manner that enterprises are defined and practiced.

The proposed actions are offered as contributions to what can become a global action agenda to directly address the root causes of so much violence and warfare, as well as economic losses taking place around the world today.