The Business of Job Creation: An Examination of the Social Enterprise Approach to Workforce Development

Abstract

Work integration social enterprises (WISEs) create jobs through business ventures that function as locations for job training and employment of disadvantaged workers. Although such employment-based poverty interventions have proliferated over the past 20 years, very little systematic research has been done on WISEs in the United States. Analyzing a national database of WISEs, this article provides a snapshot of the industries where WISEs are active and the jobs associated with those industries. Triangulating these findings with results from a small pilot study, the article explores the employment conditions for client-workers and the strategies WISEs take to add value to the work experience to understand how WISEs attempt to create better working conditions for low-skill, disadvantaged workers. The article concludes with discussion of the promise and potential limitations of the WISE model for workforce development.

Keywords:

• social enterprise
• workforce development
• transitional jobs
• WISEs
• labor market

Acknowledgments

A version of this article was presented at the 2009 annual meeting of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. The author would like to thank Mark Belzowski, who provided research assistance through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) at Boston University and Aliza Krevolin, MSW graduate student research assistant, for their assistance coding 990 and BLS data.