Obtaining Entrepreneurial Skills, While Preserving Motivation: Quasi-Experiment of Social Enterprise Training Effects

The increasing dependence on the private for-profit provision of social services worry both public service mangers and legislative bodies. While the former inquire what educational base can effectively assist public-service motivated entrepreneurial individuals to develop their aspirations further, the latter question whether a newly developed social enterprise form occurs due to imperfections of nonprofit legislature. To address these concerns, this article analyzes the data collected during a training program that helped individuals (N = 155) to launch social enterprise start-ups in a country, where a nonprofit tax-exempt option has not been yet developed on the national legislative level. Confirming several propositions of the economic and personal identity theories, this quasi-experiment reveals a mismatch between social orientation of the recruited participants and the objective to teach them business skills, suggesting that a nonprofit tax-exempt organizational form might have better supported their public service aspirations.