Conceptualizing social value

Scholarship on the question of value has emphasized the existence of a multiplicity of institutionalized understandings of value available to actors, with scholars variously employing the concepts of “orders of worth” or “institutional logics” to describe this aspect of social life. Broadly speaking, these concepts describe an organizing principle that is institutionalized in society and so can be called upon by actors as a guide for action, in that it specifies what value, quality or goal matters and how a judgment of worth can be made. Examples of dominant orders of worth include that of the market, the family, and government, among others (Friedland and Alford Reference Friedland, Alford, Powell and DiMaggio1991; Boltanski and Thévenot Reference Boltanski and Thévenot2006).

Yet, while the list of these recognized orders of worth been expanded to recognize ever more qualities (Lafaye and Thévenot Reference Lafaye and Thévenot1993; Thornton, Lounsbury and Ocasio Reference Thornton, Ocasio and Lounsbury2012), markedly little attention has been given to the study of social value as an order of worth, defined as a commitment to the private and voluntary pursuit of social good. In the case of the United States, such an oversight is surprising given that the work of private, non-governmental actors has been deemed central to the vitality and well-being of American society (Tocqueville 1835/Reference Tocqueville1966; Putnam Reference Putnam2000). Further, the United States is commonly understood as a liberal welfare state, premised on the central role of the nonprofit sector in the provision of social welfare (Esping-Andersen Reference Esping-Andersen1990). Finally, as we have seen in this book, the combined effects of a policy of neoliberalism and the rise of New Public Management have resulted in a hollowing out of the government and an embrace of the nonprofit delivery of services (Smith and Lipsky Reference Smith and Lipsky1993; Prasad Reference Prasad2006).

Despite all this, social scientists have yet to advance a theory of social value as a distinct order of worth. While a debate about the meaning of the common or public good – as the responsibility of government – is longstanding (Mills 1861/Reference Mills2007; Rawls Reference Rawls1971; Sen Reference Sen1979), we know much less about how the concept of social value is defined, enacted, and assessed in practice. Further, the study of social value is complicated by the shifting landscape of social purpose organizations and, in particular, the growth of market-based providers of social goods. In result, the task of this book was to delineate exactly how this assortment of private, nongovernment actors understand, pursue, and gauge social value as a shared orientation of action and how the rise of caring capitalism has affected the meaning and measure of this distinct order of worth.

Drawing from the literature on the commodification of intimate or sacred goods (Healy Reference Healy2006; Almeling Reference Almeling2011; Chan Reference Chan2012) and scholarship that examines how objects take on new regimes of value as they move through different societal arenas (Appadurai Reference Appadurai1998; Kopytoff Reference 249Kopytoff and Appadurai1998), I began this book with a particular expectation in mind as to the consequences of caring capitalism for social value. What I thought I would find was companies taking up the distribution of those socially beneficial goods and services that had once been the sole purview of nonprofits. Efforts to create markets around these objects would be accompanied by debate and contestation over businesses’ sale of those commodities for economic profit. Further, once these goods were established as commodities, including the assignment of price as a measure of their value, their social value would be subsumed to or made conditional upon the firm’s production of economic profit and shareholder return.

Yet, I found something quite different to these expectations. As traced out in the preceding chapters, the meaning of social value as an order of worth is not understood, practiced, or assessed in a singular, shared way across these sites. Thus, the rise of caring capitalism has not entailed firms taking up the same social project as nonprofits. Instead, the turn to caring capitalism has meant the creation of entirely new ways of conceiving of social value as an order of worth. This suggests that social value is not a “fixed entity” (Abbott Reference Abbott2001). Social value as a criterion of value is “multivocal” in nature: it is understood differently by actors across different settings (Padgett and Ansell Reference Padgett and Ansell1993). As an order of worth or institutional logic, social value is espoused by many but its proponents hold competing and contradictory conceptions of the meaning of that quality, how it can be achieved, and how judgment can be made. It is polymorphous in practice and perception; multivocal in meaning and measure.

This multivocality can be seen when we look at social value along two distinct dimensions: what types of goods generate social value and how a market logic intersects with the pursuit of social good. First, some actors view social good as occurring via the provision of products (e.g., goods or services) that they themselves deem to generate social benefit for customers and clients. Here, as we saw in the cases of the nonprofits, Socially Responsible Investing, and Impact Investing, the definition of social good is inherently subjective and so endlessly variable. For a second group, social value consists of firms’ inclusion of the otherwise economically disadvantaged into the market, by facilitating their inclusion in a value chain as suppliers, employers, and/or customers, as evident in the fields of Social Enterprise, Inclusive Business, and Impact Investing. Finally, others propose a view of social value that results from a company’s equitable and just treatment of its stakeholders (including suppliers, employees, the community of operation, and customers), including Corporate Social Responsibility and Responsible Investment.

Further, these conceptions of social value draw from the logic of the market in a variety of ways. For one, these fields differ in how proponents conceive of the best type of organizational vehicle to address their identified social problem. While some champion nonprofits, others embrace businesses as the best purveyors of social good and yet others seek to correct for the tendency of firms to impose harm on society. Another source of divergence is on whether social value is limited to the growth of economic development value for individuals and the local community or whether it encompasses a wider array of benefits, such as civic, political, and otherwise. And these understandings of social value also differ in terms of their reliance on economic profit and shareholder return as a means to and motivation for social good.

To recognize the multivocality of social value as an order of worth possesses broader pragmatic and theoretical implications. To date, the multiplicity of meanings for social value as an institutional logic holds unexpectedly mixed consequences for social purpose organizations. On the one hand, as we might suppose, there is a growing expectation that compassionate companies should employ each and all of these manifold conceptions of social value in their business practices. Multinational corporations, in particular, increasingly are held accountable by global proponents of caring capitalism for the inclusion of the poor in their value chain, for the sale of socially beneficial products, for the just and equitable treatment of their stakeholders, and for their ongoing engagement with corporate philanthropy to fund nonprofits (United Nations Global Compact 2010). And, as we have seen, if each of these notions of social value entails its own test (in the use of a specific measuring device that requires the employment of a particular kind of proof), then the demonstration of social value on the part of compassionate companies becomes ever-more time-consuming, laborious, and expensive.¹

On the other hand, given the varied range of understandings of social value present for social purpose organizations that constitute caring capitalism, we might ask about their potential implications for nonprofits as well. As companies have become accountable for the economically inclusive organization of their value chain and the equitable treatment of stakeholders, have nonprofits also become subject to these same multiple criteria of social value? For example, the Global Reporting Initiative – the international body charged with developing a uniform reporting system for corporations’ sustainability – was intended by advocates to be used not just by corporations but also by nonprofits.² Further, a substantive body of literature has established that charities historically have been subject to the logic of the market, as discussed in Chapter 2, suggesting that these expectations from the business world should filter into the nonprofit sector (Eikenberry and Kluver Reference Eikenberry and Kluver2004).

Interestingly, however, nonprofits have not – as of yet – been held accountable for these market-derived definitions of social value. As one example, nonprofits have been resistant to the implementation of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). Of the nearly 10,000 reports in GRI’s database by 2012, only 261 were published by non-governmental organizations (GRI 2012b).³ More broadly, nonprofits are not held accountable by regulatory agencies or by ratings organizations for the inclusive organization of their value chain or their just treatment of stakeholders. Nor are they moving to the voluntary self-report or the mandated report of their sustainability performance (Graddy-Reed et al. Reference Graddy-Reed, Trembath and Feldman2012; CharityNavigator 2014; Internal Revenue Service 2014a).⁴

Theoretically, the question becomes how to reconcile the existence of a multiplicity of meanings of social value across societal sectors with scholarly literature on the question of value. As a whole, this scholarship has emphasized the plurality of orders of worth, institutional logics, and repertoires of evaluation available to actors in a situation or setting (Boltanski and Thévenot Reference Boltanski and Thévenot2006). In so doing, these authors fruitfully have moved the study of culture away from a sectorally-specific notion of culture and also away from a values-based understanding of culture. The resulting task for those scholars has been to understand and account for how and why actors select from, negotiate between, and integrate these alternative notions of value in and through their lines of action in a particular context. Yet, while emphasizing the plurality of orders of worth, these scholars nonetheless assume that any order of worth, logic, or repertoire of evaluation itself is necessarily singular; it is “structured, coherent, and encompassing” (Weber, Patel, and Heinze Reference Weber, Patel and Heinze2013:351). In other words, while culture is seen to be fragmented and multiple, an order of worth is not. In contrast, one recent strand of literature has sought to question this tendency to view orders of worth as uniform and internally consistent in nature. These studies have emphasized the “plurality of worths” present within an order of worth, as in the case of the multiple and competing views of ecology found within an environmental logic (Blok Reference Blok2013) or the category of modern architecture, where organic and functional definitions of this field companionably co-exist (Jones, Maoret, Massa, and Svejenova Reference Jones, Maoret, Massa and Svejenova2012). In a similar vein, this book conceptualizes social value as an order of worth that encompasses a multiplicity of meanings yet still retains a bounded quality and that actors nonetheless draw from as a criterion of worth and as orientation of action.

Theorizing the market in society

This book is a study of how actors make sense of the move of a specific type of activity – the pursuit of social value – into the market. It examines the changing connotation of social value when it intersects with economic discourse, actors, and modes of exchange. This book has analyzed when, how, and why the meaning and measure of social value becomes subject to the logic of the market in the project of caring capitalism. Thus, the book provides us with a new way to think through the import of the economy in contemporary society.

Similarly, scholarship in economy sociology has honed in on the question of how actors make sense of the proper role of the market in the organization of society. Largely in response to an assumption that economic practices have diffused to all corners of society or that economic practices impede the pursuit of value-rational action, these authors have sought to illuminate how actors employ market forms of exchange, modes of payment, and sources of valuation to create relational lives, where economic practices can be employed towards moral, meaningful ends. People create spaces, networks, and practices that draw from a market logic but they do so in a way that allows them to realize their values, often within and as bounded by institutional constraints (Fourcade Reference Fourcade2011; Chan Reference Chan2012; Reich Reference Reich2014). Yet, one recent strand of this approach has begun to investigate cases where the construction of a market is varied or uneven. To explain these divergent outcomes, these scholars have emphasized that the creation of a moral-market nexus is, at its heart, an entrepreneurial project. Its construction requires intensive cultural effort to demonstrate the social benefits of a new market and so to achieve its legitimate status within the economy. Actors engage in extensive discursive work to frame economic activity around a particular good or service as morally oriented and so acceptable (Healy Reference Healy2006; Zelizer Reference Zelizer2009; Anteby Reference Anteby2010).

In the case of the use of money as a medium of exchange (as a form of payment, mode of valuation, and so forth), the critical work that occurs has been understood to be largely moral or cultural in nature, often around the question of whether money can be legitimately employed. By and large, the question has concerned how money is earmarked and made specific to a particular kind of activity and/or relationship (Quinn Reference Quinn2008; Fourcade Reference Fourcade2011). One oft-cited example is that of “pin money,” where wives’ income is acceptable only when it is seen as intended only for their own discretionary purchases, rather than for general use by the family (Zelizer Reference Zelizer1997, Reference Zelizer2009).

In this book, I have sought to contribute to this burgeoning literature on the construction of markets. I have shown the tremendous amount of cultural work and material labor that goes into the construction of each of the markets that together constitute caring capitalism. However, the book also demonstrates that such efforts are often uneven and incomplete. Most centrally, it upsets the assumption that the use of money is not only a cultural project in the construction of a moral market. Instead, entrepreneurs must not only strive to claim a new field as a moral market but they also must engage in another, related type of entrepreneurial labor for the successful completion of their endeavor. They must have the knowledge and resources to develop the conventions and devices needed for members of the field to assign monetary worth to the objects that circulate in these moral spaces in ways that accord with and so reproduce their discursive claims.⁵

In other words, it is not enough for entrepreneurial actors to successfully frame a new relationship as a morally legitimate site of market exchange and to demarcate that space as distinct from others. In addition, actors’ formation of the socio-material infrastructure for actors to circulate goods via the use of money also is always necessary. Further study that recognizes and accounts for the varied and uneven nature of this otherwise overlooked facet of moral markets would strengthen our theoretical understanding of the role of the market in society.

Theorizing value

A growing body of literature in the social sciences is concerned with the question of how and why value gets produced and assigned in contemporary society (Lamont Reference Lamont2012). The study of value (and the act of valuation) is analyzed in order to show the social construction of market processes (Callon Reference Calhoun, Powell and Clemens1998; Beckert and Aspers Reference Beckert and Aspers2011), to comprehend the outcomes of micro and meso-level interactions, to explain institutional change (Friedland and Alford Reference Friedland, Alford, Powell and DiMaggio1991; Boltanski and Thévenot Reference Boltanski and Thévenot2006), and to parse the distribution of power and status in a specific field (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu and Nice1993; Lamont Reference Lamont2012). While substantive disagreements in this scholarship exist, this literature nonetheless coalesces around three key claims. First, as discussed above, this emerging work on value finds that value is not singular, but rather that actors in a setting have access to multiple orders of worth, regardless of their societal location. Secondly, the selection of a salient quality of value in a situation is driven not by actors’ preferences or values but instead is socially contingent, driven by contextual factors ranging from political-institutional configurations to interpersonal interactions (Boltanski and Thévenot Reference Boltanski and Thévenot2006; Fourcade Reference Fourcade2011). Third, the act of valuation, via material devices, not only reflects the selected order of worth in a setting but also has a reactive effect. These tools, techniques, and technologies bring into being – through the process of performativity – the specific order of worth upon which they are predicated (Callon Reference Calhoun, Powell and Clemens1998; MacKenzie and Millo Reference MacKenzie and Millo2003; Espeland and Sauder Reference Espeland and Sauder2007).

This book has drawn from this literature on value and valuation in order to study social value. It asked how social value as a distinct quality, logic, or order of worth has been defined and assessed in and across a range of societal settings. It has focused on the act of valuation – through the study of measuring devices – as a way to think through how social value gets enacted through specific tools, techniques, and technologies in ways that are shaped by actors’ understandings of the meaning of social value, given varying societal locations and contrasting imaginings of a social project (Smith Reference Smith2007; Fourcade Reference Fourcade2011; Lamont Reference Lamont2012).

The book’s findings make two interventions into this literature. First, it complicates our understanding of the role of measuring devices in the act of valuation. As outlined above, measuring devices are a formal means by which actors can gauge the value of an entity or actor in a situation. They perform the act of calculation by assigning a value to a good. Measuring devices are presumed to do so through the generation of commensurability. Commensurability entails the “translation of different qualities into a single metric” so that comparison can occur (Porter Reference Porter1995; Espeland and Stevens Reference Espeland and Stevens1998). By settling on a specific quality of worth, a measuring device determines what counts and how to count it. As these scholars have shown, the use of a measuring device reduces a plurality of available orders of worth to a single type of value (Callon and Muniesa Reference Callon and Muniesa2005; Boltanski and Thévenot Reference Boltanski and Thévenot2006). And, in terms of the entities in question that are to be evaluated, the use of a measuring device creates commensurability through the removal of multiple characteristics from those objects given the selection of a single characteristic deemed relevant for assessment (Espeland and Stevens Reference Espeland and Stevens1998).⁶

When the meaning of value is ambiguous or complex in a setting, several alternatives exist to address to this challenge. A measuring device may be constructed by powerful actors that imposes a single criterion of worth onto a situation, regardless of the subjective and contested nature of meaning among participants (Boltanski and Thévenot Reference Boltanski and Thévenot2006). In the field of Socially Responsible Investing, for instance, investing intermediaries initially devised rating systems for firms that included only those issues they saw as most salient for investors, necessarily then omitting the concerns of other investors. Alternatively, in markets characterized by singularity (where goods are multidimensional, incommensurable, and difficult to evaluate), different actors may design competing measuring devices for goods that are each embody a distinct understanding of worth (Karpik Reference Karpik2010). These can be formal, as in the case of the different ratings systems published for wine (e.g., Wine Advocate, Wine Enthusiast, and Wine Spectator). Or, it may be that actors instead resort to their own subjective estimations of worth and omit the use of a formal measuring device. In her study of the peer review process, Lamont (Reference Lamont2009) shows how academics determine the worth of scholarship on a case-by-case basis in ways both individual and collective in nature.

I have argued here that another solution is possible when the meaning of value is ambiguous or incommensurable. As evident in the fields of nonprofits and Impact Investing where understandings of social value are inherently subjective and so endlessly variable, value entrepreneurs have created tools that produce what I have called customized commensurability. These measuring devices do not instantiate a particular quality of worth but are instead empty of judgment. In result, their ability to gauge the merit of an entity and to allow for comparison across entities (i.e., to do the work that measuring devices are tasked with doing) is conditional upon actors’ specification of a salient criterion. In other words, these measuring devices’ capacity for commensurability is limited or tailored to each user’s own idiosyncratic definition of value. Clearly, the theorization of value should extend to recognize both that measuring devices may perform commensurability or customized commensurability and to include a consideration of how, and under what conditions, measuring devices are constructed to create customized commensurability.

The book’s second, and more central, contribution to the theorization of value is to highlight the socially constructed nature of measuring devices as way to further our understanding of value and valuation. With some exceptions (Heuts and Mol Reference Heuts and Mol2013), scholarship to date has focused largely on actors’ determination of value – how they select from among, negotiate, and integrate multiple orders of worth available to them in a situation. The act of valuation itself has received less attention, often because it is assumed that the tools, techniques and technologies used to gauge the worth of entities reflect a prior understanding of value; they “support and enable” pre-existing evaluation criteria (Lamont Reference Lamont2012:208).

But we have seen that measuring devices do not necessarily instantiate a specific quality of worth – that disjunctures can exist between the meaning and metric of value present in a specific tool and the criterion of value it is intended to represent. To make sense of these disjunctures, analytical attention must be given to the work of those actors – whom I have called value entrepreneurs – whose efforts serve to intervene or mediate between an espoused quality of worth and the test, tool, or technique used to gauge entities according to that criterion. Here we see the salience of actors’ communicative goals and their professional expertise for explaining what types of devices are possible. More broadly, this book contributes to a more careful and more comprehensive understanding of value by extending our attention beyond the question of how decisions are made about value to include consideration of how value is assigned to goods through the act of valuation as a result of actors’ construction of specific tools and technologies.