Accountability for social impact: A bricolage perspective on impact measurement in social enterprises

Abstract

To fulfill external accountability expectations social impact measurement has become an important practice for social enterprises. Yet, the ambiguity around social impact and its measurement leads to a friction among stakeholders involved in a social enterprise. Based on interviews with small-to-medium-sized social enterprises, this paper investigates how social entrepreneurs handle the increasing pressure to measure social impact with formal methodologies through a bricolage lens. The findings show how social enterprises combine material and ideational bricolage as well as seek to delegitimize formal methodologies to increase the legitimacy of their bricolaged approaches for social impact measurement.