Does the Mission of an Organization Affect the Quality of Low-Skilled Jobs in Quasi-markets?: A Comparison Between Social Enterprises and For-Profit Organizations

In recent decades, many countries have witnessed the introduction of quasi-market regulation, predominantly in the field of personal services where social enterprises (SEs) and for-profit organizations (FPOs) increasingly compete. The goal of this article is to contribute to the SE and nonprofit literature by analyzing the influence of enterprises’ missions on the quality of low-skilled jobs and to the public policy literature by assessing job quality in quasi-markets. Specifically, we investigate job quality in FPOs and two types of SEs distinguished by their missions (work-integration social enterprises and home care services organizations). This analysis is based on a set of indicators developed to capture job quality and data collected through a questionnaire submitted to 600 workers from 47 enterprises. The results indicate that the distinction between FPOs and SEs does not explain all the differences in job quality across firms: Enterprises’ missions also matter