The Relationship Between Beneficiary Positioning in Social Enterprises and Depth of Impacts Created

Abstract

Beneficiary positioning is an important and under-examined component of how social enterprises are organized. Beneficiaries can hold a range of positions within a social enterprise including as recipients of free goods and services, customers or suppliers of goods and services to the enterprise, or as employees of the enterprise. Leveraging the Sen's capabilities framework as a tool to measure depth of impact, this paper examines six comparative cases of social enterprises with beneficiaries positioned in different roles to better understand the types of impacts social enterprises can create for beneficiaries. The cases examined indicate that beneficiary positioning has significant implications for the depth of impact created, with beneficiaries as employees having the deepest impacts for beneficiaries and beneficiaries as recipients having the shallowest.