Developing a practice perspective on social impact assessment

This paper focuses on understanding the practices of social impact assessment and how they shape, and are shaped by, cross-sector collaboration. We focus on diverse practitioners and organizational actors, their everyday... [ view full abstract ]

This paper focuses on understanding the practices of social impact assessment and how they shape, and are shaped by, cross-sector collaboration. We focus on diverse practitioners and organizational actors, their everyday activities and their relationships to understand how social impact assessment is enacted across organizational boundaries. Utilizing Sandberg and Dall’Alba’s (2009) life-world perspective, the paper explores the entanglement of activities, people, organizations, knowledge, equipment and artefacts in the lived experiences of social impact assessment.

Social impact assessment (hereafter referred to as impact assessment) has received heightened attention within the worlds of social entrepreneurship, philanthropy and non-profit organizations in response to the dominant mantras of accountability and impact (Ebrahim & Rangan, 2014; Grimes, 2010; Nicholls, 2010b), and criticisms of cross-sector collaborations and other social sector activities that fail to measure their effect on social problems (Kania & Kramer, 2011). Accordingly, there has been an increasing prioritization and sophistication of attempts to measure, assess and report how organizations within these sectors contribute to creating change in people’s lives (Ebrahim & Rangan, 2014).

Impact assessment practices are considered to include: activities, tools and frameworks for thinking about impact; methods for data gathering and analysis; artefacts such as reports, data sets, models and forms of evidence; and standards which aim to deliver common approaches to impact assessments across similar sectors. A multitude of competing formal impact assessment tools and resulting reporting mechanisms have been developed to understand social performance (Austin, Stevenson, & Wei-Skillern, 2006; Ebrahim & Rangan, 2010; Mulgan, 2011). The most commonly used impact assessment approaches include: logical framework analysis, outcome measurement, impact evaluation, balanced scorecards, social return on investment (SROI), cost-benefit analysis (CBA), integrated reporting, and triple-bottom-line accounting (Ebrahim & Rangan, 2010; Hall, 2014; Nicholls, 2009; Zappala & Lyons, 2009).

Despite the increased attention and proliferation of approaches there have been inadequate theoretical insights on the complex nature of impact assessment (Grimes, 2010; Nicholls, 2009). We argue that research to date has failed to sufficiently understanding the process of impact assessment and how people and organizations engage with this practice. This paper responds to this gap by accessing practice-based approaches (Nicolini, 2012) to conceptualize impact assessment as a social practice in attempt to understand how impact assessment is enacted both within and across organizational boundaries.

We propose Whittington’s (2006; 2007) framework for understanding strategy practice as a useful starting point for articulating the interrelated elements practice theory through both the accounting and strategy lens . The framework suggests an exploration of praxis (understanding, measuring and reporting impact), practices (tools and frameworks such as logics models, SROI and randomized control trails), practitioners (the funders, investors, government representatives, managers, employees and consultants doing impact assessment) and the profession (the standards, principles and professional bodies shaping the institutional practice of impact assessment). We adopt Sandberg and Dall’Alba’s (2009) life-world perspective, which encourages an appreciation of the entwinement, entanglement and interrelationships between the elements of Whittington’s (2006; 2007) framework, rather than treating them as discrete entities.

The paper utilises multiple qualitative case studies in the context of the emerging social investment ecosystems in Australia and the United Kingdom. This context provides an interesting arena to examine impact assessment across organizational boundaries as the field of social investment is defined by its focus on realizing measurable social impact and is demonstrating high levels of cross-sector collaboration. Six cases of cross-sector collaboration are explored through in-depth interviews (70 hour-long interviews), documentary analysis (35 impact reports) and observation (15 hours) to access the lived experiences of impact assessment within and across organizational boundaries.

Our findings put forward the notion of impact assessment as a transdisciplinary practice that is inherently conflicted, and further complicated by diverse institutional logics. Beyond considerations of accounting and strategy practice, the findings present impact assessment as a practice that extends across disciplinary silos through its entanglement with marketing, organizational learning and knowledge, technology and decision-making. The paper thereby responds to calls for a more transdisciplinary view of practices (Whittington, 2011). Our analysis of how this transdisciplinarity is enacted across organizational boundaries highlights the importance of bricoleurs who can translate impact assessment across diverse and conflicted disciplines and institutional logics.