Managing and Measuring Social Enterprises

Citation

Osborne, S.P. (2003), "Managing and Measuring Social Enterprises", International Journal of Public Sector Management, Vol. 16 No. 4, pp. 333-334. https://doi.org/10.1108/09513550310480079

Paton's book explores the important topic of the role of performance management in relation to voluntary and non‐profit organizations, or “social enterprises” as he terms them (more of this later). It contains nine chapters. The first two chapters lay out the organizational and policy contexts for performance management in the sector, while the third reviews existing literature on the topic. The next four chapters form the core of the volume, evaluating the practice of performance management within the sector. Developments examined include audit approaches to performance management, benchmarking, “kite‐marks” and the ISO quality standard, and self‐assessment quality models (such as PQASSO). Chapter eight presents an integrating framework for the range of techniques discussed earlier. Taking his lead from the concept of the “balanced scorecard” (Kaplan and Norton, 1996), Paton develops his own further concept of the “dashboard” as this integrating framework. The final chapter considers the implications of this approach for theory, policy making and management.

There is much to be commended in this volume. Paton provides a good evaluation of his chosen performance management approaches and introduces interesting evidence to support his argument. The “dashboard” concept is a nice metaphor, if perhaps unfortunate in its emphasis on the mechanistic. Finally, Paton's conclusions flow well out of the argument and present an useful agenda for the future.

If all this is so, why then does this volume finally not convince me? Three issues concern me. First, Paton has long championed the concept of “social enterprise” as a catch‐all term for the voluntary, non‐profit and community sectors. The problems with this are two‐fold. On the one hand, it confates a number of different sectors together (such a social businesses, pre‐existing voluntary organizations and community groups) without recognising the distinctive managerial challenges of each. The sector is indeed a “loose and baggy monster” (Kendall and Knapp, 1995), as Paton reminds us, but conflaring it all together does no justice to this complexity. On the other hand, it subsumes the important and distinctive field of actual social enterprises (Borgazo and Defourny, 2001) within a more generic category, which obscures their distinctive needs and managerial challenges.

Second, an underlying assumption of the volume is that performance management is something that has been imported into the public sector from the business sector. It is certainly true that over the last decade many business models have been so imported, with varying levels of success, to the sector. However this does not acknowledge the distinctive history of performance management within the sector (Osborne et al., 1995) and the lessons stemming from this history. Moreover, the selection of models, against Paton's own criteria is limited and some important ones, such as outcome funding and best value, are either missing or mentioned only in passing.

Third, although Paton does acknowledge the stakeholder and constitutive critiques of performance management models (such as Cutt and Murray, 2000), this insight is never really integrated into the study. Performance management is treated as an objective managerial exercise rather than the subjective, value‐driven and political exercise that it often is. This is a fatal flaw for the book.

In sum, an useful study, but with significant flaws. It should also be added that the index is desultory, often being little more than a list of names. This does make searching the volume for specifics difficult. Provided these flaws and limitations are recognised, however, it is a good read and worthy of consideration.