La performance de l'entreprise sociale : définitions et limites d'une évaluation monétaire

In a social enterprise, the notion of "performance" must be understood in a broader sense than the sole financial profitability. Because enterprises of this type pursue a social mission, whose completion generates collective impacts, one has to go beyond what is made possible by the sole market-based indicators. This requires to revise not only the very notion of production, but also the way in which the value of what is produced by the enterprise is measured. This is the task that the authors of the present article tackle, through building a definition of performance understood as "enlarged production" – a notion which they nevertheless define with accuracy.
Whenever the notion of production is enlarged so as to take into account the impacts of the latter, the question of whether this approach is also operational unavoidably arises. In particular, one must ask oneself whether the impacts that one wants to include in an enlarged conception of production are measurable. By nature, these impacts are not taken into account by the market and measuring them sends back to the classical question of the evaluation of non-market goods.
The authors draw up an inventory of the various techniques of monetary evaluation of the value of non-market goods and indicate whether these techniques are likely to lead to values that are relevant to evaluate the performance of a social enterprise. They illustrate their analysis by applying this grid of analysis to the methodology of social return on investment (SROI). Because of the theoretical limits of monetary evaluation, the authors conclude that works on performance evaluation based on multi-criteria analyses must be further pursued.