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Stakeholders Matter: How Social Enterprises Address Mission Drift

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Abstract

This study explores social enterprises’ strategies for addressing mission drift. Relying on an inductive comparative case study of two Italian social enterprises, we show how stakeholder engagement combined with social accounting can successfully support a social venture to re-balance its positioning between wealth generation and social value creation. Indeed, stakeholder engagement helps the internal actors of a social enterprise to rationalize and embody pro-social values previously abandoned, while social accounting reinforces this embodiment process by showing the reintroduced social commitment of the social enterprise to external audiences. Conversely, strategies focused only on social accounting and without significant engagement of external stakeholders prove to be unsuccessful in counterbalancing mission drift because they fail to activate the necessary process of internal re-introduction and operationalization of pro-social values and objectives.

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Acknowledgments

First author gratefully acknowledge financial support of the European Research Institute on Cooperative and Social Enterprises (EURICSE).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Católica Lisbon, School of Business and Economics, Palma de Cima, Lisbon, Portugal

    Tommaso Ramus

  2. IESE Business School, Barcelona, Spain

    Antonino Vaccaro

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  1. Tommaso Ramus
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Correspondence to Tommaso Ramus.

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Ramus, T., Vaccaro, A. Stakeholders Matter: How Social Enterprises Address Mission Drift. J Bus Ethics 143, 307–322 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-014-2353-y

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