The social value of multi-stakeholder cooperatives: the case of the CEFF system in Italy.

The scope of this chapter is to provide an illustration of how social cooperatives can consistently pursue their social mission whilst retaining economic sustainability. We rely on case study analysis of an Italian social cooperative. Since 1991 social cooperatives have been conceived in the Italian legislation as mutual-benefit entrepreneurial organizations with a social character. The social objective was nested into the mutualistic structure, while the multi-stakeholder governance and the accumulation of socialized assets made the social cooperative similar to more traditional non-profit forms. In 2010, the national ISTAT census of social cooperatives recorded about 10.000 active organizations.. Our study was conducted at CEFF (Educational Cooperative for the Faenza Families), an organization that comprises two social cooperatives located in Feanza, (Emilia-Romagna, Italy), offering both employability services and labor integration for the disadvantaged. CEFF case appears well versed to contribute to an understanding of the emergence, sustainability and resilience of the cooperative business model. First, we offer an analysis of the structure and development of governance at CEFF, as an illustration of the emergence of a multi-stakeholder cooperative. Second, by analyzing its evolution over time, we aim at shedding new light on the social nature of cooperation within a competitive market economy, on the ways in which cooperatives can generate and distribute social value across an integrated (horizontal) value chain by means of networking.