Sozialgenossenschaften als Akteure des Dritten Sektors – Eine konzeptionelle Analyse

Social cooperatives, in particularly, represent a growing number of formations of new cooperatives in response to the diverse social challenges. Against the background of an inconsistent definition and classification of social cooperatives in the literature, different kinds of social cooperatives are formed in this article and classified within the framework of the third sector. The identification of the forms is based on the typology of Engelhardt and the morphological characteristics of primary service addressees, identity principle and service spectrum. These forms are subsequently classified into the third sector by using the diagram of the morphology of the four-sector model. It is stated that social cooperatives that are promotion-, group-, foundation- or public service orientated, are regarded as an intersection between cooperatives in general and the third sector. As a result of the combination of morphological characteristics, a large number of differently structured social cooperatives exists in the third sector, which can be classified topographically into the chosen model.