Designing strategic relationships between profit firms and social enterprises

This work addresses the issue of the design and management of strategic relationships between for profit firms (FPF) and social enterprises (SE). After a brief review of the literature on nonprofit and for profit firms relationships, the main problem issues of such relationships are identified, and set within the frame of such issues in managerial literature for profit firms. The paper then discusses a framework of the potential forms of FPF-SE relationships as related to three dimensions of partnership analysis stemming from classic managerial literature: network form, degree of interdependence and coordination mechanisms between the parties. The framework is then tested on a set of cases of work integration social enterprises (WISE) and their strategic relationships with for profit (FP) firms.