Managing and Measuring Social Enterprises

Rating:
Summary: Best book on performance measurement in non-profit sector
Review: This is an excellent book. It is clearly written, well structured and up-to-date in its coverage. I especially liked the definition of 'social enterprise', which can be a tricky concept: Paton simply says it is "an organisation where people have to be business-like but people are not in it for the money". This definition is essentially accurate, it is easy to apply and at the same time it is quite provocative - it challenges the reader to decide whether or not to agree that 'people have to be business-like' in such organisations as charities, voluntary organisations, community groups, etc. The rest of the book makes out a good case for why being 'business-like' is always important - but never enough in itself.

The book fills a large gap in the literature - the performance measurement of non-profit and voluntary organisations is a major issue in many parts of the world, especially where these organisations receive significant funding from the government sector and have to give an account for what they achieve with those funds. However, most of the previous books on this topic have either been 'how-to-do-it' books with little reference to the academic literature or else rather laborious conceptual books with little reference to practice.

The book is in three parts. The first three chapters set the scene, locating the central issues of the book in the context of general public policy developments and the literature on performance measurement in organisations. The next four chapters present original research on eight different methods of performance measurement and/or performance improvement in social enterprises. The final two chapters draw the discussion together, highlighting the implications for managers and policy makers. The sequence of chapters is as follows:

-The Challenge of Social Performance
-Performance Management as Government Policy
-Taking Measures - Lessons from the Literature
-The Performance of Measurement
-'Best Practice' Benchmarking - Why Everyone Does It Now
-Do 'Kitemarks' Improve and Demonstrate Performance?
-Using Quality Models for Self-Assessment
-Towards Practice: Choosing a Suite of Measures
-A More Measured Management?

Of these, the most valuable for me personally was the chapter on 'The Performance of Measurement'. It examines how three 'measurement leaders' in the social enterprise sector go about the business of measuring performance. It presents research on three case studies - Groundwork (a network of environmental resource centres in the UK), PHS (a non-profit based in Seattle with a $50m turnover and the mission of 'improving lives through jobs, social services and housing) and the New Economics Foundation (a London-based independent research and policy institute committed to building a just and sustainable economy) - and then draws out a number of common themes. These themes include the value of performance measurement systems being voluntaristic as compared to imposed, the difficulty of providing information which would simultaneously support requirements for performance judgements at institutional, managerial and professional levels, the considerable costs of performance measurement, and the 'proliferation and churn' in the number of measures typically used. This chapter provides rich evidence to support the key emerging conclusions in the field.

Finally, the author says in the Preface that he has 'tried to write in a way that will be accessible to policy and practice communities as well as contributing to academic debates. In this the book succeeds admirably - it is written with a directness and vividness of style that puts it miles ahead in readability, compared to all other books on performance measurement in the public and non-profit sectors.