4.3.2 The content of the survey questions

It was mentioned above that the examination of the topic of stakeholder participation in the governance of Dutch social enter prises constituted only a small part of the broader Survey, which was designed to examine and identify a probable correlation between the engagement and participation of stakeholders in Dutch social enterprise with their success. Accordingly, the Survey comprised several sections with questions other than those related only to stakeholder participation in the governance of the examined Dutch social enterprises. An example is the introductory section of the Survey, which asked for general and demographic information concerning the respondents and the examined social enterprise, e.g. the name of the respondent, the position and the working experience of the respondent, the name of the social enterprise, the location of the social enterprise, the size of the social enterprise, etc. The collected information from these parts of the questionnaire will only be used arbitrarily in this article to clarify the elements of analysis.

A special section of questions in the Survey, entitled ‘Inclusive Governance’, corresponded directly to the issue of stakeholder participation in the governance of Dutch social enterprises. In particular, it examined: (i) the perceived level of participation and involvement of various stakeholder categories in the decision-making processes of social enterprises; (ii) the perceived extent of various kinds of input (i.e. formal/informal, direct/indirect, and regular/ad hoc) collected and embedded in the decision-making processes of Dutch social enterprises from different categories of stakeholders; and (iii) the perceived level of transparency of social enterprises towards different stakeholder groups and regarding decisions that were made (see Annex II).

The questionnaire comprised five Likert scale questions (closed questions). In the Likert scale, 1 corresponded to the response ‘not at all’ and 5 corresponded to the response ‘a lot’, whereas 6 corresponded to the response ‘the stakeholder group is not consulted for decision-making’. It also included an open space after each question for a digression/explanation by the respondent. The open space was used to mitigate any unintended bias imposed to the responses of the survey participants. The social enterprises were asked the following five Likert scale questions:

For the purpose of the special ‘Inclusive Governance’ questionnaire, definitions were provided regarding the terms ‘stakeholders’, ‘stakeholder engagement’, and ‘formal/informal’, ‘direct/indirect’ and ‘regular/ad hoc’ input. Those included:

In Question 1, the respondents from the participating social enterprises were first asked to identify their stakeholders from a list of stakeholder groups offered in the Survey. Subsequently, they were requested to provide responses to Questions 2-5 addressing and considering each of those stakeholder groups. The various groups of stakeholders provided in the Survey, were determined using the ‘ecosystems approach’, which displayed the full extent of the complex environment of social enterprises and their interacting relationship with various stakeholders.1

In addition, it needs to be clarified that literature on the matter was also consulted to define each of those stakeholder groups and to resolve issues in relation to overlapping categories of stakeholder groups in the respondents’ minds.2 An example is the categories ‘clients’ and ‘beneficiaries’ of social enterprises, which cannot be easily distinguished in the social enterprise practice.3 In the Survey the category ‘beneficiaries’ was defined similarly with the category ‘client’.4 However, the literature on the matter clarifies that the paying customers (clients) may not be the ultimate beneficiaries of the services and products provided by social enterprises and/or in some other cases the ultimate beneficiaries may not even interact with the social enterprise at all.5 An indicative example is the Dutch social enterprise Taxi Electric, which serves for the most part and directly paying clients but it benefits ultimately the environment, the health of many citizens and the long-term unemployed individuals in Amsterdam.6 Accordingly, the Survey considered and employed additional stakeholder groups, i.e. high end-beneficiaries of the examined social enterprise, e.g. ‘the community’ and the ‘society’ (see Table 4.2).