Competing Demands in Social Enterprises

Abstract

By combining a social mission with a business venture, social enterprises create innovative and sustainable solutions for social problems. This makes them role models in the world’s attempt to pursue the Sustainable Development Goals. Nevertheless, drawing from both profit and nonprofit value creation and cooperating with a wide range of stakeholders causes challenges for these enterprises. A better understanding of how challenges are experienced and managed may teach us how to build fair and sustainable ways of entrepreneurship. Therefore, this study explores challenges caused by competing demands from social mission and business venture, and how social enterprises respond to these challenges. A collective case study was conducted with 11 social enterprises focused on work integration based in the Netherlands. Findings suggest that the social mission always stays central in the decision-making of social enterprises, and that business decisions are supportive of both sustaining the enterprise as well as increasing the social mission. The majority of problems that are faced are related to the cooperation with governmental organizations. This is rather ironic since social enterprises and governmental organizations are partly working towards the same goals. Yet, the entangled relations of social and economic aspects make their partnership difficult.