From non-profit organizations to multi-stakeholder social enterprises

This paper briefly outlines the main interpretive keys that can be used to understand as traditional non-profit organizations (NPOs) underwent a long-lasting evolutionary process and were transformed step by step into new organizational forms characterized by social orientation like traditional NPOs, but by stronger entrepreneurial propensity. The specialised literature analysed the important cases of entrepreneurial non-profit organizations, of social enterprises (SEs), of social cooperatives and eventually of multi-stakeholder SEs, which can be considered the final stage of this evolutionary process. In the empirical part, the paper strives to describe and discuss the multi-stakeholder characterisation of one specific form of multi-stakeholder SEs in one single country, that is the social cooperative (SC) in Italy. Survey data show how SCs: factor in in their entrepreneurial action: 1) the interest and welfare of clients/users and beneficiaries, even when these stakeholder groups do not hold decision making power (do not partake membership rights and do not sit in the board of directors of the organization); 2) explicitly consider clients/users' need satisfaction and quality of services as their most relevant objectives; 3) distribute resources underprice or free of charge to clients, users and beneficiaries.