Multi-stakeholder Governance in Social Enterprises: Self-organization, Worker Involvement and Client Orientation

Abstract

The paradigm of self-organization is used to explain the evolutionary patterns observed in social enterprises (SEs), understood as multi-stakeholder, non-profit organizations, in Italy. Data from a survey on Italian social cooperatives are used to analyze the structure of governance and ability of SEs to pursue social, non self-seeking aims. Coherently with the paradigm of self-organization, the most salient results are as follows: (i) different stakeholder tend to follow persistent patterns in self-positioning themselves within the governance structure; (ii) paid workers appear to be the dominant insider stakeholder in social cooperatives even if this outcome is not prescribed by law, since they are present in almost all the organizations, and are the only stakeholder in a large share of them; (iii) the multi-stakeholder nature of SEs is confirmed by client orientation, since clients’ wellbeing appears prominently among the objectives of the organization, also in its distributive patterns.