Les Scop et l'entrepreneuriat social

The status of Scop is based on a participatory employee model and a strong anchoring to local community. This paper seeks to understand how Scop position themselves relative to the field of social entrepreneurship. This work builds on a series of fifteen semi-structured interviews conducted with founders and leaders of Scop from the West region of France. The main results of this study highlight the importance given to a long term view of the firm and to the prominence given to employees. It appears that the social entrepreneurship dimension of these companies emerges mainly from internal operations. Thus, our study sheds new light on the concept of "social value" as described by the model of social entrepreneurship (Austin et al., 2006). Secondly, with regard to their mission and their measure of performance, the Scop does not appear as a homogeneous model of social entrepreneurship but reveals instead three types of profiles: hybrid, social and commercial. Our empirical study of Scop confirms that the concept of social entrepreneurship does not distinguish itself from classical or commercial entrepreneurship in a binary fashion but that instead the two notions are part of a continuum (Peredo & McLean, 2006).