Appendix: Methods

To examine the effect of caring capitalism on the measure and meaning of social value, I conducted a cumulative four-year research project that employed mixed methods, including interviews with key actors, field research at professional conferences, archival research, advisory texts, professional reports, media publications, and secondary research. Assuming a constructionist approach to valuation, my task was to identify and account for the dominant measuring device or devices present in and across a range of salient fields, with the goal of outlining the history or biography of the tool as a material object constructed by actors with particular interests, out of all possible meanings and measures of social value (Appadurai Reference Appadurai1998; Kopytoff Reference 249Kopytoff and Appadurai1998; Desrosières Reference Desrosieres2001; Espeland and Stevens Reference Espeland and Stevens2008).¹ I then employed the historical-comparative method in order to develop an explanatory framework in order to account for the effect of caring capitalism on both the articulation of a social project and the measuring devices correspondingly used to gauge the worth of social purpose organizations.

First, employing purposive, sequential sampling, I conducted semi-structured interviews with 67 professional experts involved in the fields of study.² I began by speaking first with representatives from the largest and most influential members in the field (based on a review of media publications and secondary research) in order to gain an understanding of the history and goals of the field and also to identify the prevailing measuring device/s in the field. As another strategy to specify the dominant measuring device/s in a field, I also relied on my field research at conferences and I conducted a search of media publications, advisory texts, academic publications, and websites in each field in regard to any discussion of the challenge of valuation and the presence of a measuring device/s in the field. I triangulated my findings from these multiple sources in order to identify the most popular tools and techniques used to gauge social value in each field.

I then sought to interview staff at those organizations involved in the creation and/or dissemination of those measuring devices.³ To contact each organization when a prior respondent did not refer me on to a specific staff member, I contacted respondents by either emailing the organization’s general email address or by sending emails to staff members with job duties relevant to my project (e.g., those with job titles referring to performance measurement, evaluation, social impact assessment, community affairs, or social responsibility), including a brief description of my project. If and when they replied, the respondent would either consent to an interview or would direct me to the staff member who they deemed most relevant to my research purpose. Interviews were conducted over the phone and lasted from thirty minutes to two hours. I relied on a semi-structured interview schedule.⁴ All interviews involved questions concerning how the organization defined their goals, how they described the history and social project of the field, whether and how they sought to measure their performance in that regard (by what criteria and which tool/s), and what challenges or difficulties they faced in the practice of valuation. For staff at those organizations involved in the construction of a measuring device, I also asked them to provide an account of how the organization historically had decided to construct that tool and to provide me a history of its intended purpose as well as to recount the process of creating the instrument, including listing any challenges faced by the organization in doing so and modifications made to the device in response. These interviews often expanded to include other topics of interest that respondents deemed relevant to this list of questions.

In addition, I engaged in field research at practitioner-oriented conferences held by trade or member associations in each field. A growing body of scholarship views professional conferences as a space where actors make claims, contest over, and/or come to consensus concerning the field’s identity through presentations and face-to-face interactions (Garud Reference Garud2008). At each conference, I attended as many sessions as possible, with a particular focus on sessions focused on the topic of social value and valuation, including the use of terms such as “performance measurement,” “social impact,” and/or “metrics.”⁵ At each session I attended, I took detailed notes on the title and description of each session and the content of each presentation and the biography of each presenter, as well as giving attention to the themes present in the question and answer period. While this data is certainly not representative of all conferences taking place in that field, this ethnographic observation provides a unique perspective on questions concerning social value by focusing not on the formal claims made by key actors to external audiences but by examining conversations and interactions occurring among professionals in that arena. Attending these conferences, for example, gave me the chance to observe and note the questions, doubts, and concerns voiced by participants in each field about the meaning of social value, how it was being measured, and how it should best be measured.

Third, I engaged in textual analysis of a range of publications and media sources. I reviewed all available documents, reports, and websites produced by each respondent’s affiliated organization and by other organizations central to the history of the field and/or to the formation of a measuring device. I also conducted document analysis of popular advisory texts in each of the fields, the largest trade publications in each field, and mainstream media sources. For each source, I sought to identify how the author/s discussed the history of the field, the social project of the field, and the measuring devices used by actors in the field, including any accounts of the genealogy of that tool. To supplement this assortment of primary data, I drew from secondary research on each field in order to address parallel questions. The data from these multiple sources was analyzed using the central tenets of grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss Reference Glaser and Strauss1967; Miles and Huberman Reference Miles and Huberman1994).

To assess the effects of caring capitalism on the measure and meaning of social value, I employed the comparative case study method to select my cases and to establish my causal claims (Mill Reference Mill and Nagel1950). The comparative case study method consists of the purposeful selection of cases so that differences in the outcome of interest can be explained by reference to differences in the configuration of the fields under study, employing both a deductive approach to test existing expectations and the inductive method to note emerging causal patterns. I then engaged in the triangulation of my multiple sources in order to specify the precise historical causal mechanisms at work, to outline the interdependencies existing between fields, and to identify the broader, socio-economic factors at work across these fields (Lieberson Reference Lieberson1991; Sewell Reference Sewell and McDonald1996).

In regard to sampling, the relevant population was all fields in which the pursuit of social value was central to the field’s stated identity, based on knowledge gained from my past scholarship and from a preliminary review of media publications and secondary research. As shown in Table 1.1, I selected seven organizational fields as cases for analysis: nonprofit organizations, social enterprises, Socially Responsible Investing (SRI), Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Responsible Investment (RI), Inclusive Businesses, and Impact Investing. These seven cases were selected based on the intersection of two different causes that have been hypothesized by scholars to be relevant for understanding the meaning and measure of social value. First, I selected cases based on their sectoral location, ensuring that I was studying fields that were located in the nonprofit and in the private sector. Secondly, I selected cases based on their normative orientation to the market, specifically whether or not the field’s envisioning of its social project included the embrace of market methods as the solution to social problems. Finally, based on my emerging findings, I then decided to oversample cases that represented instances of caring capitalism, in order to be able to demonstrate the causal effect of the communicative purpose of the tool and value entrepreneurs’ own characteristics on the construction of those measuring devices.

My research project is perforce limited along several dimensions. First, I do not examine all measuring devices that are present in each field. Rather, my study focuses on those specific valuation instruments that, based on the triangulation of multiple data sources, are considered prevailing in the field and that are considered to have reactivity effects for constituents of the field. However, I do not focus, or collect empirical research, on the question of how organizations in the field employ these measuring devices, either in terms of their rates or patterns of use or in terms of whether and how their use of the tool causes “reactivity” for them or the field more broadly.

Secondly, in terms of the population of relevant cases for inclusion in this study, I intentionally omitted several other fields, due to issues of access to key actors in the field, the prior existence of research on the question of valuation in that arena, or the straightforward constraint of space.⁶ The book, for example, overlooks other cases of caring capitalism, including B-Corporations (Cooney Reference Cooney, Gidron and Hasenfeld2012), microfinance (Roy Reference Roy2010), and markets oriented around the ethical consumption of products (O’Rourke Reference O’Rourke2005). I also chose not to include fields that focused on environmental issues, although certainly it is often hard to empirically disentangle concerns for the social and the environmental, as in the case of the sustainability movement.

I also omitted the analysis of measuring devices that did not focus on the topic of social value. For example, in the case of international development, I sidestepped the study of tools devoted to the measure of health, given that the impact of health-based interventions on individuals and communities can be more easily measured than those concerned with the more amorphous and broader goal of social welfare. In the field of nonprofit organizations, I further limited the analysis to the study of measuring devices intended for social purpose organizations that offer direct services to clients and omitted those oriented to the provision of other type of social goods, including advocacy, arts, technical assistance, and research, except to discuss when and how they are affected by larger trends in how to measure social value.

Finally, the collection and analysis of data was limited to the case of the United States. Similar concerns about performance measurement and related valuation methodologies as present in the US are found in other nations, such as the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and many European countries; however, differences in nations’ cultures, histories, and regulatory demands have led to a variety of distinct outcomes regarding how social value is defined and measured – both in the nonprofit sector and in the market. The result is that what is occurring in the United States is not necessarily occurring elsewhere and nor it is not occurring in a similar fashion (Wright Reference Wright2001; Gjølberg Reference Gjølberg2009; Kerlin Reference Kerlin2009).