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Community-based social enterprises (CBSEs), a spatially defined subset of social enterprise, are independent, not-for-profit organisations managed by community members and committed to delivering long-term benefits to local people. CBSEs respond to austerity and policy reforms by providing services, jobs and other amenities for residents in deprived communities, thus contributing to neighbourhood regeneration. This paper aims to develop a better understanding of how CBSEs perceive accountability, how they apply it in the management and representation of their business and why.

Nine case studies of CBSEs across three European countries (England, the Netherlands and Sweden) are analysed, using data from semi-structured interviews with initiators, board members and volunteers in CBSEs.

CBSEs shape accountability and representation in response to the needs of local communities and in the wake of day-to-day challenges and opportunities. Apart from financial reporting, CBSEs apply informal strategies of accountability which are highly embedded in their way of working and contingent upon their limited resources.

Although research has shown the complex governance position of CBSEs, their application of accountability to target communities and other stakeholders is unclear. The paper coins the term “adaptive accountability,” reflecting a relational, dialectic approach in which formal, costly accountability methods are only applied to legally required forms of accounting, and informal practices are accepted by funding agencies and governments as valid forms of accountability, assessing CBSEs’ societal value in more open terms.

This chapter examines the ecotopian activist tradition through an exploration of existing literature, within a context of the processes of activism, identity and place which arise from the communitarian impulse. The initial part of the chapter sets out utopian communitarianism into separate phases. Each phase is examined for the exogenous and internalised motivations that compel people in different eras to participate in intentional living projects be they religious, autonomous, or environmental. The chapter develops these themes further by applying Sargisson's study of intentional communities to the discussion. The chapter attempts to ground this discussion within the context of the wider understandings of green utopian practice, such as Barry's ‘Concrete Utopian’ realism or de Geus's ‘utopia of sufficiency’.

This chapter maps existing patterns of broad-based worker ownership and control in contemporary advanced capitalism and considers future possibilities for expanding democracy within firms. Section one discusses worker ownership and control arrangements in relation to different theories of the firm and shows how these arrangements map onto different national systems. Section two compares Germany, which is characterized by worker control without ownership, and the United States, which is marked by worker ownership without control. Section three explores three pathways through which broad-based worker ownership and control might be deepened and more strongly coupled in the future.

Using the example of a project dedicated to labour market re‐activation in major shipyards in Sweden (Gothenburg) in the late 1970s, the purpose of this paper is to examine how integrated employment policies may be achieved using more deliberative public action than that offered by New Public Management (NPM).

Based on original archival research and interviews with ex‐participants, the research reconstructs how this project was designed and operated; its analysis is based on a capability perspective.

The paper analyses the problems encountered by projects promoting labour market integration and personal capabilities in the context of a productivity drive in a contracting industry that requires the retention of the most productive workers to stave off industrial collapse. It argues that deliberative democracy offers the more effective means for co‐ordinating integrated employment policies than governance strategies associated with NPM.

This paper offers an example highly pertinent to the labour market conditions currently facing European economies in the current financial crisis.

The paper offers original insights into the operation of the Swedish social model in practice, in a context of industrial crisis. Many scholars have analysed this model of labour market management from a national perspective: far fewer have addressed its practical limitations.