Financial Sustainability of Educational Social Enterprises in China: An Interview Analysis of Two Cases

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.201023.018How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Social Enterprises, Financial Sustainability, Revenue Streams, Leadership in Social Enterprises

Abstract

Over the last few years, there has been a surging academic interest in newly-emerged social enterprises in Mainland China. Social enterprises are becoming increasingly important to China’s civil society as they have been addressing a variety of social issues. While the majority of research focused on the general characteristics of social enterprises in China, few studies have been done on investigating whether or not these ventures are really financially sustainable in the long run. This paper aims to fulfill this research gap by doing a case study with PLO and WH - two prominent educational social enterprises in mainland China. Through conducting in-depth interviews with the founders of PLO and WH, the results are drawn out: firstly, a social enterprise’s financial stability does not necessarily depend on income source diversity; secondly, leaders’ previous experience in finance or management can contribute to the financial stability of a social enterprise. Additionally, it is also discovered that contrary to most social ventures in western countries, both PLO and WH were reluctant to expand their commercial activities to earn more revenue, a phenomenon which two interviewees attributed to China’s current stage of economic development. The findings have several implications for Chinese social entrepreneurs who wish to build financially sustainable social enterprises and offer insights for scholars who would like to conduct similar research in the future.

Copyright

© 2020, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Taorong Lian
PY  - 2020
DA  - 2020/11/06
TI  - Financial Sustainability of Educational Social Enterprises in China: An Interview Analysis of Two Cases
BT  - Proceedings of the 2020 5th International Conference on Modern Management and Education Technology (MMET 2020)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 99
EP  - 103
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.201023.018
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.201023.018
ID  - Lian2020
ER  -