Social Economy, Social Accounting, and NP Organizations

Social economy represents an area consisting of cooperatives, mutuals, associations, and foundations engaged in the production of goods and services, with no purpose of the owners’ enrichment, but instead having objectives of sharing and solidarity, being engaged in activities such as local development, re-employment, and the fight against social exclusion. Social accounting represents a set of organizational activities that deals with the measurement and analysis of an organization’s social performance and the voluntary disclosure of results to concerned groups, both within and outside the organization. The link between social economy and social accounting is given by the fact that Social economy organizations, in many cases, are hardly operationally distinguishable from for-profit business ones. Thus social accounting principles represent a convincing and valid possibility to correctly account that a social economy organization is operationally working for achieving its mission, which is different from businesses’ one and cannot be proved by financial reporting schemes.