Data Envelopment Analysis and Social Enterprises: Analysing Performance, Strategic Orientation and Mission Drift

Abstract

This study endorses the use of data envelopment analysis, which uses benefit-of-the-doubt weighting to evaluate the social, economic and overall performance of social enterprises. This methodology is especially useful for creating composite indicators based on multiple outputs expressed in different measurement units, and allows for enterprise-specific weighting of the different objectives. Applying this methodology on a unique longitudinal dataset of Flemish sheltered workshops suggest that social enterprises may face different types of mission drift. Further, our resultsshow that top-performing social enterprises are more economically and socially efficient than low performers. These top performers also have a stronger economic orientation, which sheds new light on the balance between social and economic orientations in social enterprises.

The resilience of the cooperative model: How do cooperatives deal with the COVID‐19 crisis?

“…Nevertheless, in the reality of a crisis such as COVID‐19, not all cooperatives will flourish. Empirical research shows that cooperatives sometimes take distance with their basic organizing principles and values, a coined degeneration process (Cornforth, 1995; Storey, Basterretxea, & Salaman, 2014) or mission drift (Grimes, Williams, & Zhao, 2019; Staessens, Kerstens, Bruneel, & Cherchye, 2019). How a particular cooperative will eventually react to a crisis can often be traced back to the embodiment of member‐centrality.…”

The Transformation from Traditional Nonprofit Organizations to Social Enterprises: An Institutional Entrepreneurship Perspective

“…Anyone can ask any questions or share their ideas. (Commercial Director, Art/Culture) Scholars have raised concerns that SEs' operations are driven by the pursuit of efficiency and specialization (André and Pache 2016;Staessens et al 2019). Such a pursuit may cause parts (some staff) of the SEs to not focus their attention on creating social impact and to abandon the organizations' social missions.…”

“…Such an approach, however, will ultimately divert the attention of the SEs from pursuing social missions. Scholars challenge SEs' ethical stance in that, by focussing on serving resources providers (e.g., customers), they may run the risk of providing less attention to their beneficiaries (e.g., underprivileged individuals or groups) (André and Pache 2016;Battilana et al 2015;Staessens et al 2019). This type of ethical concern is particularly relevant to traditional NPOs in the process of transforming into SEs.…”

The effect of ownership on sustainable development and environmental policy in urban waste management: An explicatory empirical analysis of Italian municipal corporations

“…The main aim of the present study is to show the causal relationships existing between the performance of Italian MOCs and their ownership structure. The first problem we faced is the identification of a composite performance indicator based on multiple outputs expressed in different measurement units (Staessens, Kerstens, Bruneel, & Cherchye, 2019). Therefore, we built an ordinal variable CLASS_SCORE to measure MOCs' financial and qualitative performance.…”