Que « produit » l’entreprise d’économie sociale ?

A social enterprise stands out in comparison with other private providers of goods and services because it is managed according to non-capitalist objectives, which has important consequences in terms of quantification: whether to generate management indicators (profitability ratios, structure ratios, etc.) or to create statistics on a macroeconomic level, conventional measurements often prove to be poorly adapted for providing an accurate quantitative understanding of what a social enterprise produces. In this article, we demonstrate that because of its complexity, the accurate evaluation of the production of social enterprise is hindered by a major conceptual and theoretical problem. We first review how the production of the social enterprise is now taken into account by the conventions of the national accounting. We later illustrate that it is necessary to introduce the notion of “broadened production” if we want to take into account all the dimensions of what the social enterprise really produces. Finally, we concluded by showing how this “broadened production” can unfortunately not be the object of a unique monetary measurement, and that it is therefore necessary to let go of the idea that it would be possible to measure the actual contribution of the social enterprise to the gross domestic product. We instead plead for recognition of the complexity of the production activity of social enterprise and formulate propositions that support the measurement of this production within another framework than national accounting.