On social impact measurement and social entrepreneurs combatting food waste in the Netherlands

Purpose This paper aims to understand how social enterprises working in the food waste sector in the Netherlands make sense of discourses around social impact measurement and explicate what they actually practice in this domain. Building on the literature on impact measurement and differentiating between outcome and output level outcome measurement, the authors want to understand, albeit current marketization and rationalization discourses surrounding social entrepreneurs, why there is a palpable reluctancy to measure social impact at the outcome level in this specific sector. Design/methodology/approach In this qualitative study, 18 semi-structured interviews were carried out with the founders and employees of the social enterprises that were operating in food waste sector. The authors use phenomenological constructivist approach. Findings The results indicated that in the Netherlands, social enterprises that combat with food waste did not measure their social impacts at the outcome level, and almost all of them resorted to arguments that delegitimized impact measurement, as theorized by Molecke and Pinkse (2017) on the outcome level. However, the findings also show that these enterprises did measure their social impact at the output level. Following Ebrahim (2014), The authors think that the nature of the sector in the Netherlands has too provided an impetus for social entrepreneurs to measure impact only at the output level, since in this sector the causal link between output and outcomes was clearly established through evidence, making outcome-level measurement irrelevant for the enterprises in question. Originality/value Sector-specific empirical analysis of social entrepreneurship is rather scarce. By using various theoretical approaches, the authors show internal dynamics of this sector, as they relate to social impact measurement at the output and outcome levels.