The Governance Challenges of Social Enterprises: Evidence From a Uk Empirical Study

Abstract

The social enterprise sector in the UK

The Development of a Measurement Instrument for the Organizational Performance of Social Enterprises

“…Further, also policy makers, funders and volunteers can have a legitimate stake in the organization. These stakeholders expect assessments and reporting to be transparent and comparable [18,19]. This has brought social enterprises under significant pressure to seek ways to more actively manage and report their non-financial performance to answer the demands of accountability to multiple stakeholders [17].…”

Towards a ‘Long View’: Historical Perspectives on the Scaling and Replication of Social Ventures

“…While much has already been achieved in addressing important questions regarding the creation, management, governance and short-to medium-term performance of social ventures (e.g. Paton, 2003;Spear, Cornforth and Aiken 2009), relatively little attention has been paid to longer-term organizational growth processes, either in terms of exploring their underlying dynamics or in assessing the wider implications for economic, social and environmental well-being 1 . Given the increasingly strong political consensus found across the world around the need for rapid scaling and replication of 'successful' social venture models 2 , there is an urgent need to address these empirical and conceptual gaps in our understanding.…”

An Empirical Investigation of Supportive Legal Frameworks for Social Enterprises in Belgium: A Cross-Sectoral Comparison of Case Studies Concerning Social Enterprises in the Social Housing, Finance and Energy Sector

“…Furthermore, due to the diversity of the organisational and legal forms of social enterprises, research regarding governance in social enterprises has been segmented. It focuses either on the examination of governance in particular legal forms, for instance concerning the cooperative legal form or the UK corporate legal form (CIC) (Spear 2004;Spear 2009;Ebrahim and Rangan 2014), or on the organisational forms of social enterprises, such as Work Integration Social Enterprises (WISE) (Campi et al 2006). Moreover, various governance theories apply to organisations that belong to different sectors including the for-profit sector and the non-profit sector (Low 2006).…”

“…Several studies have been published elaborating on a conceptual definition for social enterprises based on the creation of uniform characteristics or taxonomies (Dees 1998;Dees and Anderson 2003;Kerlin 2006;Alter 2007). Other studies focus on specific aspects of social enterprises such as the governance models of social enterprises (Spear 2004;Low 2006;Campi et al 2006;Mason et al 2007;Spear et al 2009Spear et al , 2014, the success factors for social enterprises (Sawhill and Williamson 2001;Alvord et al 2004;Sharir and Lerner 2006;Elkington and Hartigan 2008;Cox and Schmuecker 2010), and the performance of social enterprises (Kaplan 2001;Paton 2003;Austin et al 2006;Bagnoli and Megali 2011;Lee and Nowell 2014). However, the existing academic literature which elaborates on the concept of social enterprises tends to neglect the discussion regarding the influence of the institutional environment and the influence of legislation on social enterprises (Haugh 2006;Peattie and Morley 2008).…”