SOCIAL ENTERPRISES: RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ECONOMIC PROFITS AND SOCIAL VALUES

Abstract

Social enterprises (SEs) emerge as newer type of organization that are hybrids between for-profit and non-profit organizations, and are gaining recognition as a major driver of sustainable development. However, SEs typically have economic and social objectives, of which may contradict each other to produce trade-offs, or reinforce each other to produce synergies. To investigate this relationship, this research aims to 1) determine whether there are trade-offs or synergies between economic and social objectives of SEs in Thailand and 2) examine effects of macro-level factors that may have influence on SEs. This research performed regression analysis on data of SEs in Thailand, ad also obtained data on macro-level factors to analyze the socio-economic context that influence SEs in Thailand. Results show that SEs in Thailand trade-off social objective for economic objective, which can be explained by the low government social welfare spending, low international aid, and efficiency-driven economy. Importantly, despite social enterprises included in the sample size already making profits, the economic objective is still prioritized over social objective, which further raise the potential issue of business assimilation of the concept of SEs while compromising social objectives.