Do Social Enterprises Fulfill Their Social Mission? Comparing Quality Across Ownership Models in Social Care

This study addresses a foundational question for social enterprise stakeholders: does broad access to commercial revenue generation compromise the social mission of social enterprises? With limited large dataset analysis directed at this question, the social implications of blending mission and market have not been well understood. We use ordered logit regression to compare service quality data from social enterprise Community Interest Companies (CICs) with other ownership models in the social care sector in England. We find that CICs outperformed for-profits and aligned with nonprofit and government-run organizations on key social care quality measures