According to the Report Social enterprise in Europe: Recent trends and developments by Anne Liveng (in Defourny and Nyssen eds.,EMES Working Papers no. 08/01, 2008), there is no specific legislation in Denmark concerning social enterprises.
Among the variety of legal forms they can adopt, the one of the self-owning institution is the most common. It is estimated (Riis, 2003; in Defourny and Nyssen eds., 2008) that approximately 9,000 social enterprises with this status are nowadays active in the Danish social area.
They provide different services, focussing mainly on the provision of welfare services: day-care, meals, integration at work, rehabilitation, emergency centres, nursing homes, etc.
These organizations can be either strongly linked to the public administration at national or local level, which provide them with public support, or they can be largely independent by any public authorities.
Normally, social enterprises fall in the first group. This is why the third sector organizations and the Danish public sector are strongly intertwined.
In the Danish scenario there are also enterprises that do not officially fall within the definition of social enterprises, but they are characterized by a certain degree of social innovation (that is: they combine both economic and moral values: source: Ellis 2004, 2006, in Defourny and Nyssen eds., 2008), but they are based on capital ownership.
Biotechnology companies that invent products to be used in the Third World for fighting illnesses or finding landmines belong to this group.
Work Integration Social Enterprises (WISEs)
According to Liveng (in Defourny and Nyssen eds., 2008), a particular field of action of social enterprise in Sweden that have been more deeply analyzed in the literature concerns the service of work integration.
This kind of service is mostly provided by community enterprises, which offers traineeships and temporary works.
Their legal forms is often the one of cooperative or of association, but with a strong entrepreneurial component. Moreover, they are mostly set up by local actors, often in cooperation with third sector organizations.
Even though they are formally autonomous, WISEs in Denmark are mostly dependent on the public authorities that subsidize them as far as the determination of their objectives is concerned.
