Sustainability of Social Enterprises: A Case Study of Sweden

Abstract: Social Entrepreneurship is a research field associated with social value creation and inclusive growth. Social ventures primarily have social goals and reinvest their surpluses to support their mission. Sustainability of social enterprises is a debatable topic. Some researchers and practitioners believe in the long-term sustainability of social enterprises while others cast doubt on this opinion. Therefore, it is an interesting research question to study whether social enterprises are sustainable or not. Reputable scientific resources have been analyzed in order to form a conceptual framework. Two kinds of quantitative methods have been used. The first study addresses the relative financial sustainability of social enterprises by researching and comparing their exit and entry rates to the respective figures of commercial ventures. The second study evaluates the impact sustainability by assessing patterns on employment and involvement statistics of work integration social ventures. Both empirical studies are mainly limited to the Swedish market. The results reveal that though newly founded social ventures have better survival rates compared to the commercial businesses social enterprise is a relatively new field characterized by overall higher dynamics of exit and entry. Additionally, social enterprises that have established themselves on the market are more likely to employee and reach more people, although there are a limited number of such ventures and the most successful cohorts seem to be the recent ones.