What is Social Excellence

The cooperatives produce around 10% of Italian GDP. They should face two aims: the respect of the cooperative principles and their pursuit in line with the economic effectiveness principle. Cooperatives operate on the principles of the International Cooperative Alliance: one member-one vote, free and voluntary membership, and limited remuneration of the underwritten capital. In order to represent the social and the economic impact of the cooperatives actions, the evaluations of the outcome produced should bear in mind both dimensions above-mentioned. Unfortunately, no single performance measure is appropriate for all the purposes. The aim of the paper is to hypothesize a comprehensive evaluation model that allows to estimate the cooperative excellence. The emerging model will be made up of two parts representing the social and the economic excellence in turn divided in “internal” and “external” variables depending on the stakeholder considered. In the second part of the paper, the model will be tested on eight Italian cooperatives.