Resurrecting an old body of literature to define the performance of social enterprises

This speech aims to address two theoretical challenges to which every scholar interested in the performance of social enterprises is confronted: the problem of defining what performance exactly is and the integration of the complexity inherent to social enterprises in the definition of performance (Speckbacher, 2003; Meadows and Pike, 2010; Samples and Austin, 2009; Polonsky and Grau, 2008). Our point is that the performance literature does not currently provide satisfying answers to these challenges.
The first challenge identified is the confusion in the literature surrounding the definition of organizational performance (Quinn & Rohrbaugh, 1983). Performance scholars contributed to this confusion by each using an own definition of performance unrelated to any wider theoretical framework or by even bypassing the definition issue (Campbell, 1977). As they rarely share common definitions of performance, the accumulation of a body of common knowledge remains illusionary. In any case, performance scholars stick to isolated definitions and hardly recognize that multiple contingent definitions of performance can coexist in a consistent framework.
The second challenge is closely related to the first one as it also concerns the definition of performance. For social enterprises, the performance definition step is an essential issue because, unlike for-profit corporations often do, relying only on straightforward performance indicators such as financial ratios would not be sufficient. Therefore they have to work on with a more complex definition of performance, which forces them to deepen the definition issue even more carefully.
These challenges are addressed in the two sections of this paper. The first challenge is tackled in the first section of the paper, in which we compare the relative advantages of two bodies of literature likely to serve as basis for the definition of performance for social enterprises. This first section concludes with the relevance of rejuvenating an old body of literature, namely “organizational effectiveness” , which is likely to provide answers to the confusion plaguing the definition issue in the performance literature. Based on that theoretical finding, we develop a second section in which we review the OE literature to deal with the second challenge. This body of literature can potentially offer strong theoretical bases to integrate the complexity of social enterprises, except that the interrelationships between the existing OE approaches have never been explicitly stressed up to now. Therefore we address this research gap by setting up a framework articulating the existing OE approaches, which can open the way to integrate the complexity of social enterprises.