by Christian Jetté, Benoît Lévesque et Yves Vaillancourt
Cahier 01-04 – Mai 2001 – 32 pages
The social economy is playing an increasingly important role in the day-to-day political, economic and social life of Quebec, the United States and Europe1. In recent years, it has provided the focus for numerous debates in the social sciences community and among supporters of the social economy. The rediscovery of the social economy, following almost a century during which it was in and out of the public eye, may be understood in two ways. On one hand, it represents a response to the crisis of Keynesian interventionism in the economy (the employment crisis) and to the hierarchical forms of work organization and management with which Keynesianism is associated (the work crisis); on the other hand, it represents a response by civil society to the crisis in the welfare state, the most visible consequences of which are the crisis in public finances and the organizational and institutional limits to services provided by the State. In this context, social economy practices have revealed opportunities for change: by mobilizing associations, new forms of governance and civil society, they have promoted new ways of thinking about the relationship between the State and market forces.