Abstract
Drawing on the existing literature, we differentiate between social impact, operational sustainability, and—as an aggregate concept—social performance, and provide a holistic perspective on the performance of social enterprises. We review why measuring social performance is important and for whom—the organization itself and its stakeholders—as well as the challenges and obstacles involved in social performance measurement. We propose civic wealth, a variable that captures the social, economic, and communal endowments generated by social enterprises and the communities where they are located, as an appropriate performance-based dependent variable in social entrepreneurship. Civic wealth addresses the challenge of capturing organizational effects at an extra-organizational—civic—level of analysis.
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Notes
- 1.
See Ebrahim (2019) and the Social Venture Technology Group’s (2008) “Catalog of Approaches to Impact Measurement” for an overview.
- 2.
See Rawhouser et al. (2019) for an overview of conceptualizations and operationalizations in management research.
- 3.
By explicitly listing the planet as a stakeholder, we highlight that the environmental perspective is inherently included in the notion of social performance.
- 4.
For an illustration of the logic model, please refer to Ebrahim and Rangan (2014, p. 121). These authors also explain the link between logic model and theory of change, which we discuss in section “A holistic guide of social performance measurement”.
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- 6.
https://bcorporation.net/welcome-sdg-action-manager. B Lab’s impact measurement tools follow earlier impact assessment attempts, including the SAI 8000 standards for labor, the ISO 14000 standards for environmental processes, and the AccountAbility (AA1000) standards developed in the 1990s. Among the earliest ones were the Global Sullivan Principles, and later the UN Global Compact and Global Reporting Initiative.
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In practice, it is worth noting the recent development towards impact measurement at the sub-industry level, for instance, the Social Performance Task Force in microfinance (https://sptf.info)
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GOAL 1: No poverty; GOAL 2: Zero hunger; GOAL 3: Good health and well-being; GOAL 4: Quality education; GOAL 5: Gender equality; GOAL 6: Clean water and sanitation; GOAL 7: Affordable and clean energy; GOAL 8: Decent work and economic growth; GOAL 9: Industry, innovation and infrastructure; GOAL 10: Reduced inequality; GOAL 11: Sustainable cities and communities; GOAL 12: Responsible consumption and production; GOAL 13: Climate action; GOAL 14: Life below water; GOAL 15: Life on land; GOAL 16: Peace and justice strong institutions; GOAL 17: Partnerships for the goals. For more information about the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, see https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org
- 16.
Intellectual, social, individual, built, natural, political and financial (Ratner and Allen 2013).
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the Editors, Antonino Vaccaro and Tommaso Ramus, for the opportunity to be a part of the Handbook. They are indebted to Alnoor Ebrahim for his insightful comments and thoughtful suggestions on this chapter, and to Sadek Showkat for his research assistance. This chapter is partially based on ideas that emerged through the first author’s work on and collaboration with the ROSE project and the LEVO framework (www.levo-framework.com).
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Hertel, C., Bacq, S., Lumpkin, G.T. (2022). A Holistic Perspective on Social Performance in Social Enterprises: Disentangling Social Impact from Operational Sustainability. In: Vaccaro, A., Ramus, T. (eds) Social Innovation and Social Enterprises. Issues in Business Ethics, vol 62. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96596-9_7
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