Social Outsourcing as a Development Tool for Social Enterprises

Social outsourcing has become a well-known phenomenon for the recent years not only because of its extraordinary nature, but also because of the growing trend of its using as a method of decreasing public expenditures despite numerous examples of problematic situations, which this strategy faces when it is applied in unrestricted way. It usually implies the transfer of management functions related to public entities to the private sector companies or to the third sector organisations. There are some examples of harmful impact on the public services resulted from such contracting out to the private sector in the United Kingdom, which suggest that this practice needs to be reformed. At the same time, some examples concerning the contracting out of IT services to social enterprises suggest that it can be successful when it is used, engaging social enterprises in this process. Such phenomenon is not clear still, though it seems to be the case. So, the reason for that should be found, and the present paper should contribute in some way to seeking the way of explaining it. Also an attempt to formulate the criteria to assess the effectiveness of social outsourcing, allowing for current trends of designing the criteria for measuring the social effectiveness of non-profits worldwide, is made in the present paper. The limits of effective applicability of social outsourcing are formulated based on the case studies of the United Kingdom, the United States, India, Cambodia and Kenia..