Social impact and performance measurement systems in an Italian social enterprise: a participatory action research project

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the multidimensional nature of social and nonprofit organisations' accountability and performance measurement systems (PMSs). It further considers how these systems help in defining outcome performance indicators downward to beneficiariesDesign/methodology/approachThe paper discusses participatory action research (PAR) within an Italian social enterprise. In order to increase dialogue, participation and engagement, the researchers adopted focus groups as a preferred method of investigation and conducted a broad documental analysis from July 2016 to March 2018. The paper discusses the gathered data in light of the social impact value chain as well as the multiple-constituency approach.FindingsThe findings support the idea that social and nonprofit organisations lack the expertise and resources to evaluate outcomes and impact; however, through PAR, the organisation defined their desired outcomes and ascertained which internal output measures were most likely to be correlated with these outcomes. Moreover, the findings highlight that nonprofits develop outcome measurements less frequently because they have more control over their immediate activities and outputs.Practical implicationsThis research suggests the need to reinforce lateral and downward accountability based on mission and mission-based activities in order to make the performance management system of social and nonprofit organisation linked to the organisational strategies.Originality/valueThis paper innovates methodologically in two directions: 1) it adopts action research as a qualitative method, allowing the researcher to generate solutions to collectively-identified problems and 2) the paper's arguments are strongly supported by rich empirical exploration that occurred over a period of 20 months in an Italian social enterprise.

Governance and accountability in hybrid organizations – past, present and future

“…Therefore, the SE research must deal with the blended characteristics of both mission and margin mixing different types of goals, institutional logics and value propositions and measurements Campanale et al, 2020). Costa and Andreus (2020) identify two caveats to the prior accounting literature on complex performance measurements. First, "the bottom line" needs to be conceptually revisited as a broader and more comprehensive construct encompassing the creation of social value for the community as a whole.…”

“…This issue includes articles from four kinds of hybrid institutions: state-owned enterprises (SOEs) (Giosi and Caiffa, 2020), non-profit organizations (NPOs) (Kim and Mason, 2020), social enterprises (SEs) (Costa and Andreus, 2020) and municipally owned corporations (MOCs) (Krause and Swiatczak, 2020). This special issue also includes a synthesizing literature review that explores models of performance measurement in the context of hybrid public organizations (De Waele et al, 2021).…”

“A little bit of everything?” Conceptualising performance measurement in hybrid public sector organisations through a literature review

“…The current study is interested in the latter two aspects. Regarding organisational forms, scholars have studied hybrid organisations such as social enterprises (Battilana and Lee, 2014;Costa and Andreaus, 2020;Doherty et al, 2014), state-owned enterprises (Giosi and Caiffa, 2020), municipally-owned corporations (Krause and Swiatczak, 2020), non-profit organisations (Kim and Mason, 2020;Skelcher and Smith, 2015), knowledge-intensive public organisations in the education and healthcare sectors (Gebreiter and Hidayah, 2019;Grossi et al, 2020) and public-private partnerships (PPPs) (Liu et al, 2014).…”

Biased by design – the case of horizontal accountability in a hybrid organization

“…The complexity may introduce problems (e.g. Costa and Andreaus, 2020). For example, the hybridity has eroded the traditional notion of accountability and caused difficulties by weakening political control while emphasizing performance function of accountability in which performance is measured by the extent to which it achieves stated goals (Willems and Van Dooren, 2011).…”