Managing and Measuring Social Enterprises

Rob was born in Africa, schooled in Edinburgh, and a student at Oxford and the University of Pennsylvania′s Wharton School. He has taught at the Open University for more than 25 years where he helped pioneer the use of Supported Open Learning for management development and has led several major curriculum development and design exercises. He was instrumental in setting up the Centre for Public Leadership and Social Enterprise, where he is based.Starting with studies of worker co-operatives in the 1970s, he has had a long-standing interest in how value-based organisations can sustain their social commitments and still ensure effective, enterprising forms of management and organisation. His research on performance measurement and improvement methods in public and non-profit contexts led to the popular Managing and Measuring Social Enterprise (Sage, 2003). Currently, he is working with nine chief executives in a study (funded by Zurich Financial Services Charitable Trust and NCVO′s Leadership Centre) of the ′inner world′ of leaders in public and non-profit settings.For many years he has also pursued an interest in management learning, publishing articles, leading research projects, and working with the Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Business, Management and Accountancy to encourage new approaches to teaching and learning. Recent publications include a co-edited volume on Corporate Universities.He has consulted to, and taught in, a range of public and non-profit organisations, and chaired the Trustees of the Scott Bader Commonwealth (a small multi-national chemical company of Quaker origins that has an international reputation for employee involvement and corporate social responsibility). He has served as Secretary of the Association of Researchers on Non-profit Organization and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA), the leading international body in this field, and is a member of the Advisory Council for the University Network for Social Entrepreneurship.

"The book′s interplay of conceptual and empirical thinking is one of its strengths. Data to illustrate the results come from case studies conducted with 13 individual organizations and 6 multiorganizational units, all of them in the United Kingdom, and all using one or another performance-measurement system. Each of the middle five chapters of the book reflects on some specific element of this agenda, and these chapters will be particularly interesting to practicing managers. Each one explores a different top-level issue in performance measurement with specific research questions and methods for data collection and analysis, drawing data from several main data sources. This book can be treated as a foundation for future research in effectiveness studies, and is also a rich source of good counsel to nonprofit managers. Paton has provided managers with much information on the utility and practical application of measurement systems, in a range of nonprofit service areas. Managers who need to "sell" Performance measurement inside their organizations will find this helpful. It is elegantly written and well structured, and though the setting for the case studies is British rather than American, it is entirely relevant to American nonprofit managers. In the scholar and practitioner libraries, it should be complemented with comparable tools for measuring program-level effectiveness and community impact. But overall, Managing and Measuring Social Enterprises is an ideal addition to the organizational effectiveness literature."

• The Challenge of Social PerformancePerformance Management as Government PolicyTaking MeasuresLessons from the LiteratureThe Performance of Measurement`Best Practice′ BenchmarkingWhy Everyone Does It NowDo `Kitemarks′ Improve and Demonstrate Performance?Using Quality Models for Self-AssessmentTowards PracticeChoosing a Suite of MeasuresA More Measured Management?