The European Happy Research Exchange Program (TEHREP) or How to Overcome Borders That Leads to Good Research for a Better Understanding of Social Enterprises.

The social enterprise is trending topic at different levels in society. At the micro level municipalities and citizens are dealing with it, at the meso level national governments have given it a high place at the political agenda and at the macro level the European Union has done a great deal of work.

If we take a closer look at the patchwork of literature and visible initiatives, the excitement about the concept is rather strange. We do not have that much information on the workings or outcomes of social enterprises. The only tangible result we have is a definition: a business with primarily social objectives whose surpluses are principally reinvested for that purpose in the business or the community, rather than being driven by the need of maximize profit for shareholders and owners.

There are a lot of important questions to be answered and maybe sociologists are the first to deal with these questions at all levels in society and in different countries. With the definition of a social enterprise in mind colleagues of different countries (e.g. Denmark, The Netherlands, Germany, Macedonia, Estonia) got the idea of working together in organizing good (participative) research to explore an interesting concept. They organized themselves in The European Happy Research Exchange Program (TEHREP) for a better understanding of the workings and outcomes of social enterprises.

To understand the social enterprise is to do research with different stakeholders. TEHREP is working with different topics at all levels of society (e.g. human rights, poverty, community building, social innovation). Besides sociologists with an academic background there is also collaboration with colleagues from universities of applied science. A fruitful combination. The first results are now delivered. It shows us that social enterprises can only be understood at the level of grassroots by organizing interdisciplinary and international collaboration.