Search

This paper investigates the assignment of economic value to firms' social and environmental performance through a comparative analysis of two recently created moral markets, Inclusive Businesses and Responsible Investment, which join companies' pursuit of social welfare with that of economic gain. Yet, while the proposed distinctive appeal of both Inclusive Business and Responsible Investing is premised on firms' production of social/environmental benefit as a social good and as a source of shareholder return, the assignment of economic value to firms' social/environmental performance did not occur in both settings. This paper shows that extant literature's attention to actors' conception of the market - including their meaning of the market and their model of the market - are not adequate to explain the assignment of economic value to firms in these markets. Instead, attention must be given to the work of evaluators, whose capacity to construct the complex tools of financial valuation required for economic valuation, is dependent on their valuation repertoire - their stock of professional knowledge and experience with existing valuation methods and conventions--from they draw in order to create new tools. Consideration of this critical work of evaluators allows for a more comprehensive understanding of why not all moral markets that embrace the promise of companies to produce social and shareholder value necessarily involve the assignment of economic value to businesses' social/environmental performance. This paper possesses critical theoretical implications for not only the study of money but also for our understanding of the role of the market in contemporary society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates when, how, and why nonprofit organizations are assessed for goodness, examining metrics and measures of success in the case of the US nonprofit sector from 1900 to the present. The essay articulates two distinct but interrelated claims. The first point is that nonprofit organizations have almost always, with only a few moments of exception, been expected to account for their efforts - they have been asked, in one way or another, to demonstrate that they are doing well at doing good through the use of quantification. However, the criteria of success has changed over time - the history of the nonprofit sector in the US is replete with shifting, unstable, and often conflicting metrics and measures of organizational performance. More concretely, I find three competing measures of how nonprofits can count good, each of which articulates a very different vision of how to define and count success on the part of nonprofit organizations. Secondly, these shifts in practices of measurement are explained by delineating the political and organizational struggles in which they were enmeshed. These different ways of "counting good" results from contestations between actors over the meaning of and control over the proper role and purpose of the nonprofit sector. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Donors' ability to attach strings to their contributions has become increasingly prevalent in the nonprofit sector. Using the case of workplace charity, this paper examines the determinants of nonprofits' adoption of donor choice as a mode of fundraising. Drawing from a nation-wide survey of United Ways, it tests three central yet competing tenets within organizational theory as possible explanations for United Ways' adoption of donor control. I find that donors' preference for choice results in donor choice, regardless of the nonprofits' extent of resource dependence, the presence of competition, the composition of the institutional environment, or their own characteristics. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the emergence of novel cultural and institutional forms of community in the non-profit sector. Scholars have conflicted over the nature of community and its state of modernity. The traditional model of community perceives social bonds as being originated out of the structural prerequisites of place and proximity. Community has reproduced in meaning and has taken on new institutionalized forms. A traditional vision of community retains the premise that community is placed in place and that members of a community share a common and inclusive interest, despite the diversity of its residents.

Over the last three decades, we have witnessed the growing importance of collective identities and interests in various spheres of American society. Scholarship on the implications of these social movements for the nonprofit sector has proliferated, but there is still much more to be learned. While scholars have focused on the challenge of resource acquisition for identity and interest-based nonprofits, we know less about the conditions that underlie their formation. This paper uses the case of workplace charity to identify the demographic, economic, and ecological characteristics that result in the emergence of these types of charitable organizations. Based on a logistic regression analysis of alternative funds across American cities, I show that while alternative funds represent new identities and interests and, in result, provide employees with the ability to make charitable gifts based on these types of concerns, the presence of those identities and interests among community residents does not explain where alternative funds have appeared. Rather than being driven from changes occurring below; that is, at the level of individual donors, alternative funds are instead determined from the top; that, is by the configuration and dynamics of the organizational field and by the work of non-profit entrepreneurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]