Public Value generation in social enterprise business models

• In Event: Social enterprise and social innovation

Abstract

The literature on public value (PV) has evolved from considering PV as the result of public managers' activities (Moore, 1995) to a more recent understanding of PV as a type of value that can be created also by non-public sector organizations. Authors such as Hartley et. al. (2017) and Bryson et. al. (2017) support the idea that it is urgent to understand how private, philanthropic and hybrid organizations are generating PV since these organizations have appropriated responsibilities historically occupied by the State. Social enterprises (SE) are an example of hybrid organizations that seek to merge characteristics of civil society organizations and the market to generate social and environmental value (Comini et. al., 2021). Recent research has highlighted that SEs play an important role in PV generation (Calderini et. al., 2023). This article explores the question: how social enterprises generate public value?
We adopt Meynhardt's (2009) PV approach , which operationalized the PV concept by basing it on four human basic needs. These needs translate into four dimensions of PV: moral-ethics, hedonistic-aesthetics, utilitarian-instrumental and political-social. According to Bryson et. al. (2015), Meynhardt's perspective emphasizes the overlap between the public and private spheres and, thus, is suitable for studying non-state organizations.
Studies applied Meynhardt’s perspective to understand the generation of PV in Swiss companies (Meynhardt & Jasinenko, 2020) and Italian cooperatives (Bandini, Gigli, & Mariani, 2021). However, little is known about how PV can be generated by non-state actors in non-European regions. The increase of SEs in the Brazilian scenario brings an opportunity to explore this gap.
We adopt the business model as an analytical tool to understand how companies are structured internally to generate PV (Baden-Fuller & Morgan, 2010). Bandini et al. (2021), based their analysis of PV generation on the social business model (Yunus et. al., 2010). We argue that an activity system approach enables us to analyze in detail the internal and activities of an organization to generate and capture different types of value. Therefore, we adopt the design elements of business models proposed by Zott and Amit (2010) to analyze the different activities carried out by a focus organization and its relationships with other actors.
This research objective is to analyze how the business model design elements of SEs enable the perception of the generation of different dimensions of PV by the social actors involved. We apply multiple case studies methodology (Eisenhardt, 1989; 2021) in four Brazilian SEs. We collect data from documents and interviews with actors related to the business model of the selected companies. The work seeks to make three contributions. First, to fill the gap in the PV literature by analyzing the generality of the concept for a new context: SEs as potential generators of PV; Second, adding the perspective of PV to SEs literature; and, finally, with practitioners and supporters of the field of SEs, who will be able to better understand how their work generates PV, in addition to ways to enhance it and reduce its barriers.

References

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Authors

• Ana Luiza Mathias, Universidade de S�o Paulo

• Rosa Maria Fischer, University of Sao Paulo