Purpose – Today’s socio-economic crisis ongoing in many countries, is strongly challenging the value creation approaches and the sustainability of traditional for-profit enterprises’ model, mainly focused, if not exclusively, on the satisfaction of the shareholders or the owners. In this context, that sees even more companies reducing or shutting down, the Social Enterprise (SE) is increasing the production and the opening of new units, distinguishing for its competitive capability and sustainability. The paper investigates the reasons at the basis of such SE’s performance, identifying in the management model setting the peculiar reason: multistakeholder structure, balanced value creation among stakeholders, integrated management of three key dimensions: compliance, process performance, knowledge and learning.
Design/methodology/approach – The research has been designed on the basis of case study methodology. In particular an italian Social Enterprise theoretically significant and relevant for the investigation of the research topic has been sampled. The qualitative data collected have been carried out from interviews to the president, observation of day to day management practices, participation to enterprise’s internal meetings, access to organization’s repositories.
Originality/value – The paper analyses one of the oldest italian social enterprises, and discloses key elements of its management model, providing useful insights for a sustainable value creation model setting.
Practical implications – Identifying social enterprise management model’s settings, enable to compare traditional for-profit enterprises’ model with SE’s ones. For-profits may benchmark useful settings in order to create value and be sustainable in today’s turbulent competitive context.
Keywords – Social Enterprise, Value creation, Management settings, Integrated governance