Toward a reconciliation between external accountability requirement and the social sector: lessons from stewardship theory

Not-for-profit organisations are increasingly being held to account for their social performance. Due to their resource dependency, they generally rely on external financial resources to ensure their missions. This alternative is usually coupled with social accountability requirements from private investors. Given their externally induced nature, social accountability initiatives might result in the implementation of management control systems imported from the for profit organisations without any real consideration of the social sector's characteristics and complexities, leading to an oversimplification of the social field reality. Relying on both agency and stewardship theories, we wonder how to reconcile external reporting obligations with the characteristics of not-for-profit organizations? To do so, we rely on a single qualitative case study of a social organization in charge of housing services which recently introduced a reporting system following external requirements from private investors. We stress the potential hazards resulting from the implementation of an agency theory - based system in a social context and maintain that accountability expected benefits are unlikely to be reached. We eventually develop recommendations to improve the actual device, focusing in particular on the elaboration of new metrics.