Social enterprise and stakeholder governance : a comparison of the CSR performance in single-stakeholder and multi-stakeholder structures

In times of deep restructuring of the national welfare systems, social enterprises have progressively received the attention of practitioners, policy makers and scholars for the role of agents of the social change in the provision of a wide range of human services and the development of entrepreneurial initiatives aimed to the sustainable regeneration of the local community. As social economy organizations serving the general interest, they distinguish themselves more from the other third sector organizations for the involvement of user and local stakeholders in the service activities and decision making processes as a way of balancing multiple objectives. The purpose of the dissertation is threefold. The first two chapters aim to introduce to the study of third sector’s social enterprises by reviewing and comparing main concepts and meanings affecting this term as much as they were emerged in the academic and managerial literature of three different regional contexts (USA, Western Continental Europe, and UK) in the last decade. The third and fourth chapters provide a basic theoretical framework to approach the governance of the social enterprise by a stakeholder perspective, focusing on the role of incentive played by the multi-stakeholder structures to the balance of the firm’s multi-dimensional performance. Finally, last chapter presents, describes and analyzes findings from a study that compares the CSR performance of worker members in Italian social co-operatives with single-stakeholder and multi-stakeholder structures, in order to gain evidence of the potential positive effects of the multi-stakeholder governance structures on the CSR performance of the social enterprise.