How did the Pandemic Crisis Affect the Financial, Economic, and Social Performance of Social Enterprises? Insights from Italian Social Cooperatives

Abstract The COVID-19 crisis affected the world’s economic and social system in many ways. Social enterprises (SEs) play a necessary role in delivering social value during such crises (Bacq, S., and G. T. Lumpkin. 2020. “Social Entrepreneurship and COVID‐19.” Journal of Management Studies 58 (1): 285–8; Sarma, S. K., K. K. Kumar, and S. K. Mishra. 2022. “Strategic Response to COVID-19: How Do Social Enterprises Navigate Crisis Situations?” Social Enterprise Journal 18 (4): 626–42; Weaver, R. L. 2020. “The Impact of COVID-19 on the Social Enterprise Sector.” Journal of Social Entrepreneurship 14 (2): 177–85). However, there is still a lack of empirical evidence that analyzes the impact of the pandemic on the performance of SEs and how that performance differs from traditional, non-social companies. Therefore, the purpose of this contribution is to fill this gap. This study compares two types of organizations in the same Italian context: social cooperatives and private limited companies. We present and compare their performance using ratio analysis in a three-dimensional perspective: economic, financial, and social, where the latter concerns the ability to create and distribute value-added to stakeholders (Riahi-Belkaoui, A. 1996. Performance Results in Value Added Reporting. Westport: Quorum Books), with particular emphasis on distributional fairness (Haller, A., C. J. van Staden, and C. Landis. 2018. “Value Added as part of Sustainability Reporting: Reporting on Distributional Fairness or Obfuscation?” Journal of Business Ethics 152: 763–81). In addition to policy recommendations, this study provides guidance on how to use existing accounting data to approximate social elements in business.