5.2.3.3 Participatory governance in the Netherlands

In Chapter 4, the research is extended for illustrative purposes to the Netherlands, a country which does not provide for legal tailor-made participatory governance structures for social enterprises. Survey-based research on Dutch social enterprises demonstrates that the input from key stakeholder groups is considered fairly in the decision-making processes of the participating social enterprises. This input is also particularly informal, direct, and ad hoc, i.e. it does not have a regular or structural character. Informal cooperation takes place by means of commonly occurring types of participatory stakeholder mechanisms, such as: (i) stakeholder consultation processes; (ii) technology interactions (newsletters, websites, and social media); (iii) stakeholder thematic events; and (iv) evaluation forms and satisfaction surveys. However, these results are only exploratory and encourage scholars to conduct further in-depth qualitative research on stakeholder participation in the governance of Dutch social enterprises to examine in an in-depth manner the perceptions, motivations, and drivers of various types of stakeholders to participate in the governance of social enterprises.1 The findings from a qualitative study on stakeholder participation in the Dutch social enterprises may then be compared with the findings of the meta-synthesis developed in this doctoral thesis to unravel similarities and differences in the participatory governance of social enterprises which either employ or do not employ tailor-made legal forms.