| Summary: | The development of social enterprise as a potential tool to assist local and community economic development, has led to a range of debates specifically about the social and entrepreneurial values they exhibit. These debates have led to more theoretical questions about how social enterprise can transfer knowledge and best practice within and between local networks of association and how their successful outcomes should be measured. These issues have posed problems for many social enterprise support agencies and policy makers as they attempt to make sense of both support and development needs. Ultimately, these have led to a study about obtaining a better understanding of the support networks at regional and sub-regional levels, which are available for social enterprise. This has been done through a critical examination of contemporary policy documentation and research grounded in empirical investigation, about the development of the social economy, the effectiveness and construction of social enterprise support, how local economic development policy knowledges evolve and are shared and how social enterprise intersects and interacts within established socio-economic and socio-political systems. The thesis was undertaken between 2002 and 2008 and utilised a grounded theory approach to triangulate both qualitative and quantitative approaches to research principally through a national scoping survey and sub-regional interviews with social enterprise support providers and policy makers.
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