Charting the role of space in the social economy

Norma M. Rantisi and Deborah Leslie

Chapter 5 in A Research Agenda for Economic Geography, 2025, pp 63-76 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: The social economy plays an important role in communities grappling with poverty and marginalization. In a time when labor market flexibility and precarity have heightened – and when the apparatus of the welfare state has been cut back – these organizations help individuals confront intersecting forms of inequality. Work integration social enterprises (WISEs) constitute one form of social economy organization. WISEs offer training and other supports to assist women, immigrants, youth, and 2SLGBTQ+ populations. Drawing on interviews with WISEs in Toronto and Montreal, we examine the potential and the challenges associated with these organizations. We argue that social enterprises incorporate a range of possibilities that are located within – but also beyond – conventional labor markets (as well as neoliberal, racist, patriarchal, and heteronormative relations). We foreground the pedagogical, institutional, and spatial practices that can help WISEs realize their transformative potential, mapping out an agenda for future research on the social economy.

Keywords: Social economy; Labor markets; Space (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035339914
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781035339921.00011 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:23610_5

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jack Sweeney ().