Paper short abstract:

The paper deals with the contemporary formal (cooperatives and social enterprises) and informal (communitarian practices) socio- economic initiatives and practices in Slovenia It is interested in their motivations, cooperation, organisation, structure, experience and dynamics.

Paper long abstract:

The initiatives in social economy and communitarian practices among the people have formed through the critique of the modern socio-economic development, neoliberal policies, individualisation and estrangement, social and ecological problems (in relation with moral and ethical transformation), and as a response to the modern precarisation. These initiatives have also been - simultaneously and in a specific manner - included in the so-called rationalisation of the labour market social costs (the changing employment policies and social reforms), social welfare marketing, and entrepreneurialisation of society (Nikolas Rose 1998, Ash Amin 2002).

The paper explores the dynamic of these process by analysing various contemporary social entrepreneurial experiences in Slovenia - social economy at the national level was institutionalised as social entrepreneurship (2011), including a contemporary cooperative, and some informal communitarian practises (an eco-village experiment, a sustainable park, and a self-organised form of social care). It is interested in their motivations and experiences: How do they establish themselves, in what sort of environments, who encourages them, how are they related and structured? Are these responses to precarity and unemployment, survival strategies, or conceptions of something different? What is their dynamics? A special emphasis is on the conceptualisation of solidarity, the basis of social economy, identification and analysis of the experience in solidarity as an embodied practice, in connection with the concepts of integration, and community.