The Sustainability Performance of Social Enterprises in China: The Configurational Impacts of Ecosystems and Revenue Structures

Despite the global development of social enterprises (SEs) over the past three decades, how to improve sustainability remains a challenging issue for most SEs. Although SE ecosystems have been recognized as crucial determinants of SE sustainability performance in the current literature, no empirical study has comprehensively examined the relationships among them. Additionally, prior studies have demonstrated that sustainability performance might vary among SEs of different revenue structures or across different contexts, suggesting that more attention should be devoted to the complexity of the causal mechanisms determining SE sustainability performance. To address these gaps in the current literature, this paper examines the complex, divergent, and asymmetric causal links among SE ecosystems, revenue structures, and the sustainability performance of SEs in China by conducting fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) of 274 typical cases of SEs. The results revealed alternative configurations for high and low levels of sustainability performance among SEs of different revenue structures. First, the fsQCA results indicated that SE sustainability performance was not determined by the impacts of single components of SE ecosystems but rather by the combined effects of multiple elements. Second, for SEs of divergent revenue structures, causal paths leading to high or low levels of sustainability performance showed notable discrepancies in terms of both number and composition. Specifically, commercial SEs receiving income mainly from market-based earned income were more likely to achieve higher levels of social and financial sustainability because of greater adaptability to SE ecosystems and less environmental dependence. Third, the impacts of different components of SE ecosystems on sustainable performance also varied with SE revenue structures. Three categories of components—policy environment, sociocultural setting, and industrial infrastructure—made more important contributions to SE sustainability performance in both the social and financial dimensions.