The Client Knows Best: Unpacking Social Enterprise Beneficiaries’ Preference for Restorative Work

Social entrepreneurship is an entrepreneurial process in restoring, emancipating and caring for at-risk groups to reintegrate them into the society. Although there has been some initial conceptualization on social enterprises as a conduit of restorative work for at-risk individuals, a systematic investigation on the preference structure of such individuals as users of restorative work practices remains scarce. Studies on preference structure is important because it captures what is valuable to individuals and can prevent beneficiary dissatisfaction. Drawing upon the emerging ‘restorative entrepreneuring’ perspective and using a discrete choice experimental method, we probed how people with disability who were beneficiaries of work-integration social enterprises (n=208) evaluated and made trade-offs amongst five job-related restorative practices: positive identity, positive social relations, accommodating environment, caring culture, and career advancement and one monetary attribute. While most restorative work practices were significant, career advancement support had the greatest importance of all. We advance social entrepreneurship by shifting the scholarship’s focus to the demand side of restorative work and shedding light on restorative work practices which are important to beneficiaries. We also demonstrate a relatively novel method in evaluating multi-attribute restorative work practices where individuals assess competing attributes holistically, rather than viewing each practice as isolated from one another.