Edited by Laurie Mook, Jack Quarter, and Sherida Ryan

While the term ‘social economy’ is used widely in Western Europe and Quebec, it has had minimal currency in English Canada, where the differences between the public and private sectors and among nonprofits, co-operatives, social enterprises, and community economic development organizations have been emphasized.  Researching the Social Economy addresses these limitations by presenting a collection of original essays on the burgeoning bodies of research on the social economy across Canada. 

In this volume, contributors representing an inter-regional and international network of scholars and community organizations analyse how the social economy, in its many manifestations, interacts with and shares characteristics of organizations in the other sectors of the economy. The first study of its kind, Researching the Social Economy enriches our understanding of how this important cluster of organizations contributes to Canadian society in both economic and social terms, and lays the groundwork for future study.

Laurie Mook is an assistant professor in the School of Community Resources and Development at Arizona State University.

Jack Quarter is a professor and co-director of the Social Economy Centre at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.

 Sherida Ryan is the co-ordinator of the Community University Research Alliance on Social Business for Marginalized Social Groups at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.