Unveiling the EU Policy Framing of the Social Economy: an Analysis of Recent Policies and Strategies

Over the last decades, the social economy has been called upon as a provider of social and employment policies, both at the European and national levels. Social economy organizations have proven to respond to the main social challenges in an innovative way (Borzaga et al., 2017). In the Green Paper on Equality and non-discrimination in an enlarged European Union (2004), the Commission recognizes the instrumental role of civil society organizations, in advancing EU priorities in combating discrimination. At the turn of a new decade of European strategic and funding framework, our research aims to unveil the main themes that emerge from EU strategic orientation documents and to analyse the place of the social economy in such documents. The paper analyses the main EU official strategies and policy documents using automated text analyses to allow the extraction of relevant terms and the possible relationships among them within a large textual corpus. Text mining and topic modelling techniques have been applied based on a comprehensive lexicon of nonprofit terms related to social economy organizations, which have been reviewed and validated by experts. The automated techniques allow to identify the main guidelines, recurring themes, and emerging concepts, and the critical analysis of the results allows to explain the ways in which the social economy is framed (as provider of social services, as social innovator and entrepreneur, as an advocacy actor). The challenges and opportunities of applying text mining technologies in qualitative research and social policy analysis are also discussed.