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This essay treats both democracy and the market. The essay assesses the condition of modern workplace democracy and reconsiders the potential for genuine and thoroughgoing democratic practices within corporations that find themselves “globalizing” and responding to market forces. To ground my analysis, I draw upon the case of the Mondragón cooperatives in the Basque Country, Spain, a system of worker-owned-and-managed cooperatives that began to engage the European and global markets in the years immediately preceding European Union unification in 1992. I wish to update and widen the scholarly discussions of Mondragón while also using the case to identify some of the most important contours of the intersection of democracy and the market today.

Aims to explore the historical development and current usages of the concept of social entrepreneurship.

The paper first examines the socio‐political conditions leading to business repositioning in the traditionally governmental role of catering to the financial needs of civil society. It then reviews several models of social entrepreneurship and the leaders who have emerged as social entrepreneurs within those frameworks.

In discussion the paper questions some of the motives of social entrepreneurs and warns against uncritical acceptance of a blurring of the boundaries between sectors of society.

This is a theoretical paper. Follow‐up research will examine in detail case studies of social entrepreneurship.

Social entrepreneurship is a new and rapidly rising field of practice that is, as yet, under‐researched. This paper synthesizes the limited yet diverse current literature on social entrepreneurship. It also offers a critical perspective that needs to be taken into account before the practice is accepted as a common‐sense salve to social difficulties.