Directions for Social Enterprise from an Efficiency Perspective

Pyoungsoo Lee and Yong Won Seo
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Pyoungsoo Lee: Korea E-Trade Research Institute, Chung-Ang University 221 Heukseok, Dongjak, Seoul 06974, Korea
Yong Won Seo: College of Business and Economics, Chung-Ang University 221 Heukseok, Dongjak, Seoul 06974, Korea

Sustainability, 2017, vol. 9, issue 10, 1-16

Abstract: Social enterprise is recognized as an alternative for sustainable development, as it balances social aspects with economic prosperity. Evaluating social enterprises is very important for both the enterprises themselves and the government, since grants from the government or institutions highly depend on their performance. While relatively significant attention is paid to the social value that these enterprises create, there is a lack of interest in assessing the operational performance directly linked to the sustainable operation of social enterprises. Therefore, this research analyzes the performance of social enterprises from the efficiency perspective, incorporating both operational (economic) and social performance measures. To this end, we apply data envelopment analysis to assess the performance of social enterprises when considering the dual-role factor—the grants. To facilitate clarity for readers, a dataset of Korean social enterprises is used. Through this analysis, we show that the grants can be used for performance evaluation in different ways for each enterprise. Furthermore, an industry-specific analysis provides more realistic and feasible benchmarking information to which inefficient social enterprises should refer. We expect that these findings will complement existing methods of social enterprise evaluation.

Keywords: social enterprises; performance evaluation; efficiency; data envelopment analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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