Understanding Social enterprise through institutional and organizational lenses: Carlo Borzaga’s contribution

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Introduction

In this article, we would like to highlight the major role played by Carlo Borzaga to the social enterprise field by giving an economic foundation to social enterprises. Our aim here is not to attempt to present all of Carlo Borzaga's contributions, but to focus on one dimension of his work that I consider important for research on social enterprise, and which inspired me a great deal during my PhD thesis. Carlo Borzaga’s proposition was to introduce an institutional approach, combined with an organizational one, to the social enterprise field.

Carlo Borzaga, together with his co-authors and colleagues, such as Jacques Defourny, Jean-Louis Laville, Marthe Nyssens, Victor Pestoff and Roger Spear, with whom, and some others, he founded the EMES network, were pioneers in recognizing the role and specific features of social enterprises in society. Within this emerging stream of research, we will build our demonstration on the proposition of Carlo Borzaga, together with Alberto Bacchiega, to consider social enterprises as incentive structures (Bacchiega & Borzaga, 2001). Before that, building upon Henry Hansmann’s work on the ownership of enterprise in 1996, the literature on nonprofit organisations considered that they had no owners and that they were not efficient as they lacked incentives from the market.

Carlo Borzaga developed his analysis in a period, common to many European countries, of changing welfare states and of a restructuring of responsibilities between the public and private sectors leading to delegation and contracting out processes with the growing involvement of a variety of actors in supplying quasi-collective services. Because of this increased competition among providers, the nonprofit organization model started to evolve towards a more entrepreneurial dimension. Within this context, there was a growing need to go beyond the state-market dichotomy to better understand the complex institutional forms and the larger diversity of organizational forms, that are not purely for-profit, nonprofit or public ones, such as public-private partnerships or hybrid organizations (Brandsen and Karré, 2011; Pache and Santos, 2012).

To better recognize and understand the institutional and organizational diversity of organisations was part of Carlo Borzaga’s research agenda in the early 2000’s with a specific focus on cooperatives and social enterprises. His proposition is that social enterprises have organizational and institutional dimensions that provide them with an incentive structure making them more efficient than other private or public organizational forms.  

This article is divided into two parts. The first part is dedicated to the contributions of Carlo Borzaga as far as social enterprises as incentive structure is concerned. In the second part, building upon Carlo Borzaga’s heritage, research perspectives and challenges for future scholars in the social enterprise field are suggested.

I. Social enterprises as incentive structures

Carlo Borzaga’s work relies upon the hypothesis that economic theoretical models could be broadened to consider the fact that stakeholders are generally driven by a plurality motivations and complex preferences (Borzaga et al., 2011). Building upon the seminal work of Coase (1937) and Williamson (1975, 1985), neo-institutionalist theory, by enlarging the conception of the enterprise, provides a frame to partially explain the emergence (and the efficient structure) of social enterprises and the adoption of innovative governance structures. We propose to summarize the “incentive mix” provided by social enterprises in three elements: their capacity to answer to market and contract failures, their allocation of ownership rights to a diversity of stakeholders and their work organization which can generate higher job satisfaction.

Social enterprise as an answer to market and contract failures

The production of many welfare services is characterized by a quality difficult to assess, given the important relational dimension that determines their quality, and the uncertainty associated with the complexity of the objectives pursued. Information on the quality of service is therefore imperfect and often asymmetrical, making contracts incomplete and opening the door to opportunistic behaviour on the part of service providers. The risk of such behaviour is all the greater when the services concern vulnerable people such as dependent elderly people or young children. The least informed stakeholders are then likely to turn to poor quality providers (adverse selection) or obtain a service of lower quality than advertised (moral hazard). Ben-Ner and Van Hoomissen (1991) were the first to put forward the idea that ‘demand’ stakeholders, i.e., those interested in the provision of the service itself, can set up a non-profit organisation when they are vulnerable on the market, provided that the net benefit to them is positive. Becoming an owner enables them to reduce the risk of opportunistic behaviour in the supply of goods and services, the quality of which is difficult to assess, but also entails costs associated with ownership. These stakeholders choose the not-for-profit form because their main motivation lies in obtaining a quality service rather than appropriating a monetary surplus. For instance, in France, many services providing care for disabled persons have been historically created by parents of disabled children for such reasons: the lack, insufficient or inadequate provision of care services, their strong incentives to provide high quality services, and to have a better control of the quality of the service as it could not be easily evaluated by the children themselves.

Note that these contract failures generated by asymmetric information not only exist between producers and users but also between producers and donors/public funders who must be secured that the funds are used adequately.

Trust between service providers and users and/or donors is therefore central to guaranteeing the expected level of quality in a context of asymmetric information. Faced with these so-called trust goods, Hansmann (1980, 1988) has given a central role to the non-distribution constraint of non-profit organisations to reduce the risks of opportunism led by profit maximization incentives.

Building upon Hansmann’s argument, Carlo Borzaga joined some critical debates by stressing that the strict non-distribution constraint was not the only one way of dealing with these contract failures.  Other organizational and institutional features developed by organisations such as cooperatives and social enterprises, which do not have a strict but a limited non-distribution constraint, can reduce opportunistic behaviour. Among possible solutions, the direct involvement of users in the production process, is a way to reduce opportunistic behaviour, leading authors such as Victor Pestoff (2009) or Jean-Louis Laville (2016) to stress the importance of the “coproduction” of services. Co-production refers to the fact that citizens (users) participate in the production of certain goods and services. It makes it possible to tailor services more closely to users' needs, and generally increases user satisfaction because of their involvement in production. Co-production can refer to different ways of getting citizens or users to cooperate in the provision of services (Brandsen and Pestoff, 2009, p. 497).

More largely, the involvement of a diversity of stakeholders into the internal control or ownership of the organization is considered an efficient way to reduce the risk of opportunistic behaviour in the presence of asymmetric information. The presence of users, volunteers, donors, public authorities, but also workers in the governance of the organization is a way to control for the quality of the service (or the proper use of funds) more directly.

Social enterprise as a new form of ownership and governance

Characterizing non-profit organisations based on the sole constraint of non-distribution of profits does not explain their growing diversity. Thus, the definition of property rights has been reconsidered to take better account of the specific institutional and organisational arrangements of NPOs and social enterprises and to explain the emergence of multi-stakeholder ownership.

These works start from Hansmann’s definition of ownership in terms of joint possession of formal rights, the rights to residual control and the rights to residual earnings (Hansmann, 1996). The residual character relates to rights that have not been previously assigned in a contract. Residual earnings consist of the financial surpluses after all financial commitments have been met. Rights to residual control consist in the rights to control that have not been assigned by law or contract to other stakeholders (and to the managers of the firm) and may be limited to the right to elect the board of directors and to vote on a small range of issues such as merger or dissolution of the firm. Two corollaries are often attached to this economic conception of ownership rights (Nyssens & Petrella, 2009). First, these two rights must be combined for the system of ownership rights to function as an incentive. If those who have control had no rights over the residual earnings, they would have little incentive to use their power of control to maximize those earnings. Next, it is supposed that the investors are generally the owners of the firm. Implicitly, it is understood that the objective of the firm is to maximize residual earnings, i.e., the net financial surplus, which will be redistributed to the owners, the investors, for example, in the form of dividends. Non-profit organizations cannot redistribute the net surplus among the stakeholders who have the power of control, be they administrators, directors or members. Strictly speaking, no one has the right to appropriate the residual earnings. This characteristic led some authors to declare that “Non-profit organizations do not have owners” (Glaeser, 2003, p.1).

However, the notion of residual claimants can be reconsidered to examine other ways of distributing the surplus. In non-profit organizations, the persons who have control in the organization have the collective task to reinvest the residual earnings in the organization. Ultimately, these residual earnings, collectively allocated, return in multiple forms to what Gui calls the “beneficiary category” – beneficiaries who vary according to the mission of the organization in question: for example, the users of the service, or the persons being integrated, but also the people who control the organization as in the case of sports clubs (Gui, 1991). While individual redistribution of the net financial surplus is forbidden in NPO’s, an assignment of residual earnings thus still takes place. This reasoning can be extended to social enterprises in which only a proportion of the surplus is individually redistributed, such as cooperatives.

This reconsideration of ownership rights, even if these are neither linked to the capital invested nor individually distributable, provides a better understanding of the diversity of social enterprises according to the types of stakeholders who own the property rights and according to the type of allocation of residual profits decided collectively by these stakeholders.

Following this stream of research, the European literature on social enterprises introduced the possibility of involving a diversity of stakeholders in a not-for-profit or a limited profit-distributing enterprise producing quasi-collective goods or services in order to palliate the failure of the market, mainly in terms of imperfect information and collective benefits linked to the provision of goods or services (Borzaga and Mittone, 1997; Bacchiega and Borzaga, 2003; Petrella, 2003; Defourny and Nyssens, 2011). The participation of users, volunteers, employees and public authorities in the ownership of the organization can be seen as a way of constructing the collective interest. In these multi-stakeholder organizations, actors set to work with the intention of acting locally for the sake of a quasi-collective good. These benefits are no longer a phenomenon induced by economic activity, but a dimension demanded by its promoters, be they employees, users, associations or representatives of the public authorities (Laville and Nyssens, 2001).

For example, while traditional cooperatives are mainly governed by one type of stakeholder (workers, consumers, producers), the need to consider the interests of a plurality of stakeholders and to pursue a general interest purpose within a cooperative form has emerged in many European countries. In France this need has led to the adoption in 2001 of a new legal form, the collective interest cooperatives - Sociétés coopératives d’intérêt collectif (SCICs), which “are joint-stock or limited liability companies with variable capital, governed (…) by the Code of Commerce. They have as their objective the production or provision of goods and services of collective interest which have a social utility character” (Law of 17 July 2001). The first novelty lies in the cooperative statutory framework, which allows for multiple stakeholders within the governance structure. The law also allows SCICs to identify sub-groups of members with different voting colleges at the general meeting (employees, users, volunteers, local authorities, any physical or legal person who contributes to the activity). At least three colleges are required, of which two are obligatory: employees and users. The second lies in the fact that the economic activity is clearly carried on from the benefit of the community and not that of its members, with recognition by the public authorities of the social utility character of its production (Petrella et al. 2021).

Bacchiega and Borzaga (2001) show, for their part, that the involvement of a diversity of stakeholders in ownership constitutes a specific system of incentives and relationships which pushes these stakeholders to act in the interests of the organisation. Relationships of trust are created through the participation of these stakeholders in the property and through the implementation of more participative management practices. For example, allocating residual control rights to employees, when it is difficult to measure the effort they make, is a way of reducing control costs, because of the motivation they derive from their participation in the organisation's decisions. The social enterprise thus set up a special incentive structure, based on employee participation rather than on control mechanisms.

However, this literature has also highlighted the fact that the integration of a variety of stakeholders into the ownership may increase the ownership costs associated to the collective decision process (Hansmann, 1996), given the presence of multiple interests, which may be, at least partially, heterogeneous, and difficult to conciliate on a common objective. As Hansmann (1996) points out, these ownership costs will be all the greater as the number and diversity of members within the governance structures (board of directors, general meeting) increase, even if the members share a common desire to contribute to the production of a quasi-collective good or service. It is therefore vital for the organisation's governance to reconcile the interests of the various stakeholders without the costs of collective decision-making becoming too burdensome and hampering the smooth running of the organisation.

For Borzaga et al. (2011, p. 46), these forms of organisation can indeed combine economic benefits for their stakeholders with the production of positive externalities with broader societal goals. Although a multi-stakeholder ownership is not a panacea and is often difficult to manage from day to day, it is a promising form of ownership that could be further explored.

Workers’ motivations in social enterprises

Within the intensive mix provided by social enterprises, beyond the analysis of ownership and governance structures, Carlo Borzaga, with his co-authors (such as Ermanno Tortia and Sara Depedri on this topic), have gone deeper into the analysis of the internal dimension of organisations. They analysed the specific organizational routines or devices that social enterprises develop to face motivational and behavioural complexity.

They highlighted the fact that, among others, social enterprises have work organization’s patterns that provide higher levels of job satisfaction to their employees than their counterparts in for-profit organizations, even though their pay and employment contracts are usually less favourable. Based on the analysis of a data set created in 1999 on a sample of 228 public, non-profit, and for-profit organizations operating in the social service sector in Italy, and on 2,066 workers, Borzaga and Tortia (2006) concluded that workers in non-profit organisations have a higher work satisfaction than the other organizational forms. Social enterprises have set up adequate incentive structures to align their employees’ motivations with the objectives of the organization, thereby taking advantage of job satisfaction (Borzaga and Tortia 2006).

They contributed to the literature on job satisfaction in the case of social enterprises by identifying how workers motivations and loyalty on the one side and work organization variables on the other play a role in job satisfaction. They consider that organizations can provide an incentive structure that can influence workers motivations because it aligns both motivations and organizational objectives. Work organization variables, as defined by Borzaga and Tortia (2006), cover the characteristics of the job itself (such as task variety and significance, degree of autonomy, control, meaningfulness of the work) and those of the (physical and relational) work environment (such as relations with colleagues, access to information, participation in decisions). The role of workplace social relations and interactions—between colleagues, line managers, and clients — is indeed included in the analysis as it has been stressed as important in social and community care services (Borzaga and Depedri 2005). More precisely, they found that non-profit organizations had a competitive advantage in their ability to provide relational incentives. This question is still under scrutiny today in the literature (as our recently published article illustrates, see Joutard et al., 2024).

II. Heritage and challenges for the next generation

In this part, we would like to focus on the heritage and potential for future research of Carlo Borzaga’s proposition concerning the specific institutional and organizational dimensions of the social enterprise model. The EMES network has built an “ideal type” of the social enterprise characteristics which serves as a “compass” for researchers in the galaxy of social enterprises (Defourny, 2001). This initial ideal type has slightly evolved since and is now constituted by three sets of criteria: economic and entrepreneurial dimensions, social dimensions and participative governance. With these features, social enterprises can potentially be in a good position to answer to multiple crises and tackle societal challenges.

Building upon this ideal type of social enterprise, that is now called the “EMES approach” of the social enterprise, we could explore the potential of social enterprises as sustainable models for transition given their multiple stakeholders’ participation, democratic governance, and work organization based on workers’ autonomy, participation. Future research could therefore examine under which conditions social enterprises could be sustainable transition models and inspiring for other types of organizations. Let us here suggest three main topics that could be further explored by researchers.

Social enterprises and the commons

As developed above, Carlo Borzaga’s work has contributed to the recognition (and better understanding) of a greater institutional and organization diversity. His work can therefore be related to that of Elinor Ostrom and other researchers who define property as a “bundle of rights” that can be partitioned, separated, and alienated (see for instance Commons, 1893; Schlager and Ostrom, 1992; Ostrom, 2010). Ostrom and Schlager (1992) identified different rights: the right to access the resource, the right to appropriate the fruits of the resource, the right to manage the resource, the right to decide who has access to it and, finally, the right to transfer or sell the last two rights (right of alienation). According to Ostrom, property regimes are plural since these rights are independent and can be combined in different ways. Her work contributed to the recognition of the institutional plurality, going beyond the more classical State-market dichotomy approach in economy. She shows that institutions in the field of common goods are rarely purely public or private and that other institutional set-ups are possible and effective.

But both works can also be put in dialogue to compare the provision of quasi-collective goods and services by social enterprises to the collective management of common pool resources largely studied by Ostrom (Ostrom, 2010). They have in common to involve a diversity of stakeholders in the management of the resources, who self-organize and define collectively their own system of rules and governance structure, both dimensions considered by Ostrom as crucial for an efficient and sustainable management of this type of resources. In the case of quasi-collective goods or services, the same mechanism is observed: different stakeholders get together and adopt hybrid forms of organizations to provide these goods or services more efficiently. In line with this approach, some authors have started this dialogue (see for instance Nyssens & Petrella, 2015; Eynaud & Laurent, 2017; Eynaud & Laville, 2021) which should be pursued in the future as the question of governance and of sustainable management of different types of common goods or resources (material and immaterial, local and global) is at the heart of many social and environmental challenges.

Social enterprises and hybrid organizations

When it comes to institutional and organizational diversity, including multi-stakeholder ownership, the issue of hybrid organizations quickly comes to the fore. Hybrids are considered as organizations that span institutional boundaries (Brandsen and Karré, 2011; Pache and Santos, 2012), combining features from public/for-profit/nonprofit organizations and are thus influenced by different and even contradictory institutional logics. Social enterprises can be considered as hybrids: they pursue multiple social goals, involve multiple stakeholders, and mobilize a mix of resources. But their hybrid character takes mainly its roots in their intrinsic capacity to articulate different exchange logics, market, redistribution, and reciprocity, building upon the analytical framework of Polanyi (1944). Today, it is both their essence and their challenge to maintain the balance between these three logics given the presence of high isomorphic pressures (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). As Doherty et al. (2014, p.427) stressed, their hybrid nature is both a challenge and an opportunity to cope with institutional pressures and find innovate organizational forms.

Analysing more in depth new organizational forms, multi-stakeholder, and multi-level, is part of the research agenda to face societal and ecological challenges.

Social enterprises and democratic governance

But the major issue, in our view, concerns the issue of democracy and most specifically of democratic governance. In a context of high competition and institutional pressures, social enterprises potentially provide models that are more sustainable than other forms of organizations given their democratic and participative dimension. By democratic, we mean that the decision (voting) power in the governance body is not distributed according to the capital shares held by stakeholders but is shared among a diversity of stakeholders, in general according to the “one member, one vote” principle. Workplace democracy is indeed more and more debated in various forms of enterprises although not always associated with democratic decision process into the governance structure as it is the case in social enterprises.

The democratic and participative dimension of governance is considered as a safeguard against isomorphic behaviour, a way to avoid or mitigate mission drift (Cornforth, 2014). But keeping a democratic governance alive and efficient, beyond the bylaws, is an important challenge for many social enterprises, especially when they are scaling up (Spear et al, 2009).

Conclusion

In the last years, social enterprise (and the social economy in general) has the wind in its sails, as witnessed by the European Commission action plan on the social economy adopted in December 2021 or the UN resolution on social and solidarity economy adopted by the UN General Assembly in April 2023. Carlo Borzaga, together with his colleagues from the EMES research network that they have created together, were pioneers and made a major contribution to the promotion of social enterprises in Europe (and later in the rest of the world), which was little recognized twenty years ago. His publication “The emergence of social enterprise”, in 2001, co-authored with Jacques Defourny, is considered the first scientific volume devoted to this now consolidated topic of research.

But, despite this recognition, the challenges for future generations of social enterprise researchers are considerable. Fortunately, there is a vibrant community of researchers ready to take up these challenges.

DOI: 10.7425/IS.2024.03.04

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