Do social enterprises fulfil their social promise? Quality of social care CICS and other legal forms

This study seeks to address a foundational question around the operation of social enterprises, namely, does the redirection of profit towards social goals result in expected social outcomes even though profit motives may still be at play? The social enterprise literature has danced around this question in its discussion on the tension between mission and market goals, concerns about mission drift, and whether nonprofits and government entities are better at meeting social goals than social enterprises. However, with little, large dataset empirical analysis directed at this issue, researchers, policymakers, and practitioners have had difficulty understanding the broad social implications of blending mission and market casting a shadow on the validity of social enterprise. To address this question, we use ordered logit regression analysis to compare service quality data from Community Interest Companies (CICs), charities, for- profits, and government- and independently-run organizations operating in the social care sector in England. We find that social care CICs consistently outperformed for-profits and independently-run organizations on all social care quality measures and did as well as or better than nonprofits and government-run social care organizations across the same measures.