Employment models in social enterprises : does the mission matter for job quality, discrimination, and motivations of workers in low-skilled positions ?

Social enterprises (SEs) represent a consequent number of jobs and are being established in increasingly diverse types of industries. Besides, employers and workers are starting to structure themselves in more visible and identifiable professional organizations. In this context, the existence of a specific employment model in SEs may be discussed, particularly with regards to (low-skilled) job quality. Nowadays, this question is even of upmost importance because such organizations are more and more entering into competition with for-profit organizations (FPOs) and public organizations, notably by the creation of quasi-markets. Many questions related to the comparative analysis between FPOs and SEs have already been discussed in economic literature (in terms of their efficiency, trust in their relationships with consumers, etc.) but the question of employment model and job quality is, however, at the heart of recent works and remains a controversial issue. This thesis is structured around three main issues. First, do FPOs and SEs offer the same quality of low-skilled job? Second, SE workers are usually considered to have different motivations and preferences than their counterparts in FPOs. In the case of low-skilled jobs, the hypothesis can be challenged. This is the second question at the heart of our thesis. Finally, literature suggests that SEs discriminates less than FPOs but previous empirical studies only focus on gender discrimination in wage. In our thesis, we focus on race discrimination and on predictors of discrimination in managerial practices (i.e., managers’ prejudice and organizational diversity management policy) instead of looking at discrimination in one particular practice (wage).We choose the quasi-market of service-vouchers in Belgium as our empirical field. It offers the opportunity to compare FPOs and SEs with different types of mission (one being worker-centric and the other user-centric). Considering housekeeping jobs in this quasi-market allow to catch the effects on the employment model due to the organization’s mission without any disturbance from other effects related to the industry or to the type of job provided.(ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 201