WP 14 | 11 The social cooperation business system. Origins and development of social cooperative consortia

The essay aims to study the organizational structure, i.e. the integration between companies developed by social cooperation in Italy over its thirty years of history. In fact, to best carry out their tasks, social cooperatives make use of the Consortium, an entrepreneurial entity that almost never operates in the final part of the supply chain, rarely places itself on the finished services market, preferring to be in the middle: to produce services for businesses . The article highlights the evolution of the role of the consortium system: from a promotional and political-union role it has moved on to a more targeted one. The consortium tends to carry out a smaller number of and increasingly specific functions, above all to strengthen the entrepreneurial profile of the social cooperatives and of the network as a whole.