From a charitable trust to a social enterprise: Balancing social missions and economic imperatives for community sport development in New Zealand

Abstract

While social entrepreneurship has been variously defined and widely discussed in the sport management literature (Bjärsholm, 2017; Cohen & Peachey, 2015; Ratten, 2010; Sanders et al., 2014), the term ‘social enterprise’ has not been adopted and vigorously investigated to the same extent. This is surprising given that there has been increasing attention to social enterprise in the wider literature on not-for-profit or public management (e.g., Chew, 2010; Douglas, 2015; Miller & Hall, 2013; Teasdale, 2012). In the U.K., the discourse of social enterprise was initially instigated by the New Labour government (1997-2010), and continued by the subsequent Conservative-led government, to transform the third (or voluntary) sector into social enterprises (Dey & Teasdale, 2013). In 2014, the New Zealand National government announced its ‘position statement’ to support the development of infrastructure and funding sources for social enterprise. Generally, social enterprise is defined as an organisation that aims to generate surplus (unlike not-for-profit organisations) and reinvest it in accomplishment of its social mission (in contrast to profits going back to shareholders and owners).

The paper aims to achieve two objectives. First, it will highlight differences between social enterprise and social entrepreneurship in terms of their conceptualisation and etymological backgrounds against a backdrop of increasing scholarship on social entrepreneurship in the sport management literature. Second, the case study approach was employed to address ‘how’ sport and recreation organisations turned, or attempted to turn, into social enterprise (Yin, 2009). This included semi-structured interviews with representatives from two charitable sport trusts in New Zealand. By examining the cases, we will illustrate: (a) how the ideas of social enterprise have been put into practice in the sport and recreation sector; (b) what motivated the practitioners to transform their organisations; and, (c) what challenges they faced with the transformation. Findings indicate that the transformation can create tensions between business-minded change agents and traditional public or not-for-profit entities in terms of ‘mission drift’ (Chew, 2010) or a change in focus from charitable/social purposes. The results provide empirical evidence of the charitable trusts’ engagement with the discourse of social enterprise and help contribute to the understanding of the dynamic changes occurring in the third sector of which most sport organisations and charities are part in New Zealand.