Such a state of affairs to some degree reflects a lack of interest in the quantitative distribution of
social enterprises, but it is also an outcome of a lack of reliable data on the spatial distribution of the
hybrid institutions that constitute the social economy. In the case of the question posed above about
the geographies of social enterprise, data availability and quality have been major obstacles to
progress, and this paper highlights some of the limitations of the existing national-scale quantitative
data on social enterprises.