The Social and Economic Mission of Social Enterprises: Dimensions, Measurement, Validation, and Relation

Abstract

Social entrepreneurs have a dominant social mission and generate revenue to ensure financial viability. However, most research treats the extent to which social entrepreneurs actually adhere to social and economic mission as a black box. Performing higher order confirmatory factor analysis on a sample of social enterprises (N∼270), this study identifies dimensions and validates measures for understanding and delineating social and economic missions, and shows how the two constructs relate to each other. The theoretical untangling and the empirical validation of social and economic missions as distinct constructs—and multiple potential constellations of attached relative importance—opens up opportunities for quantitative hypothesis–testing research in social entrepreneurship.

Assessing mission drift at venture capital impact investors

“…However, we do not rely on the subjective evaluation of investors' statements on their investee being mission‐driven or not, but carry out a content analysis of mission statements similar to Stevens et al's. () study of social enterprises. We examine investee firms' mission statements through a content analysis and assign “1” for firms with social logic, “0” otherwise.…”

“…In order to identify mission drift, we measure both ends and means of organizations through a content analysis (Krippendorff, 2012) of mission statements. The duality of hybrids might be mirrored in the organization's values, culture, and structure (Stevens, Moray, & Bruneel, 2015;Thornton & Ocasio, 2008) and mission statements could be used as proxies to measure organizational identities (Leuthesser & Kohli, 1997). We conduct a content analysis of mission statements as a proxy for observing logics: financial logic if making financial returns and social logic if generating social benefits/returns.…”

“…In the analysis of mission statements of investors and investees, a major difficulty is identifying social value goals of firms. Considering that "social" means very different things to different people (Stevens et al, 2015), the terms "social value" and "social impact" are considered to be subjective and vary greatly from one context to another (Ebrahim & Rangan, 2014). Previous studies offers different solutions; while some conduct content analysis (Miller & Wesley, 2010), some carry out interviews with entrepreneurs and/or workers (Lee & Battilana, 2013).…”

Social enterprises in the Indian context: conceptualizing through qualitative lens

“…social issues, with priority over economic value. While popular wisdom talks about the social mission leading to the creation of social value, not much of social entrepreneurship literature was found which elicited the concept of social value (Stevens, Nathalie, & Johan 2015). This construct has come up with some indicative vocabularies.…”

Creation of ICT-Based Social Start-Ups in Iran: A Multiple Case Study

“…These groups of researchers narrowly discussed some essential issues. For example, Moss et al (2011) as well as Stevens et al (2015) analyzed the mission statements of social ventures and their focus on different aspects of social ventures (start-ups). Moreover, Nga and Shamuganathan (2010) focused on personality traits and demographic factors.…”