The use of 'best practice' is currently recommended in many sectors and by many disciplines. The term, although in wide usage, lacks clarity because it is not clear whether: 1) best practice consists of a claim that practitioners, from their own experience, believe the practices to be feasible and 'useful' to implement; or 2) that best practice consists of practices which have been proven to improve high-level outcomes (through making a strong outcome/impact evaluation claim).

 The project team concluded that the social enterprise field is so new and immature that it would be a mistake to attempt to identify 'best practice' exemplars apart from pointing to examples of practice that have been identified by other bodies as being 'good' in some manner. The problem with identifying best practice is establishing the criteria for such a judgement and then having a sufficiently large and longditudinal study to ensure that best practices 'stay best'. There have been many examples, like ABB, Enron and RBS, in the management literature that were lauded as best practice, but were later found to be much less glittering than frist thought. high profile social enterprises, like OnePlus (See attachement below_ in Scotland which failed as spectacularly as they were praised.

 Instead, the teams in UoN and CUEB are working together to explore the different notions of 'danwei'- the Chinese concept of 'work unit'. We will be looking at the organisational ethics of danwei and comparing that to social enterprises