Keywords : value, social impact measurement, management tool
Over the past few years, several scholar works have been published about value and valuation, proposing alternative conceptions to traditional economic theory. Unlike a conception where goods have a value before they are exchanged on a market, these approaches aim to show that value is socially built (Vatin, 2013, Callon & Muniesa, 2005, Orléan, 2011).
In parallel, the term “value” has been used inside organizations for several years. It was studied in various fields – marketing, strategic management, accounting, and project management – and refers mostly to financial benefit for firms. Such an approach disconnects creation of value and measurement of this value. However some research works focusing on organizations consider a broader vision of value (Freeman, 1999) and focus on the imbrication between value and organization’s processes (Cappelletti & Khouatra, 2004).
Following this latter perspective, this paper tries to analyze processes of “valuation” (Dewey, 1939) inside an organization, arguing that processes of valuation rely on the imbrication of value attribution (“evaluating”) and value increase (“valorizing”) (Vatin, 2013). Then it aims to contribute to knowledge on building and measuring value inside organizations in a processual approach, and more specifically, it questions the role of tools which are implemented in organizations in order to measure value in this processual approach.
French scholar literature on management tools studies the preeminent role of management tools used in organizations (Berry, 1983, Chiapello & Gilbert, 2013). A tool has not only a technical aspect, but also bears an underlying vision and a system of actors’ role (Hatchuel & Weil, 1992). These analyses show that tools have a specific agency (Orlikowski, 2007), which influences human action (Leonardi, 2011).
This question of valuation is particularly important in the case of nonprofit organizations, which are increasingly challenged to measure all the benefits they produce through their action, which are non-economic and barely strictly quantitative ones (Kanter & Summers, 1987). Many tools were designed over the past few years to measure this value, often designated in the nonprofit sector as “social impact measurement” (Clark, Rosenzweig, Long, & Olsen, 2004) or “social utility evaluation” (Gadrey, 2005). Nevertheless there is a lack of consensus on the best methods and most of researchers suggest that nonprofit organizations should build their own tools (Cordery & Sinclair, 2013).
The paper aims to study how a particular organization measures its value and how the process of evaluating contributes to that of valorizing through tool creation.
The analysis is based on an action-research methodology in a large French nonprofit organization dealing with young people at risk. Five processes of building social impact assessments undertaken in the NPO are analyzed as case studies (Yin, 2009). Combinations of tools constructed in each process are different and depends on each particular context.
Results of our research shed light on different mechanisms allowing tools to combine evaluation and valorization. We identify different forms of value, linked to different valuation processes. The analysis of these mechanisms helps us to understand how nonprofit organizations tackle the question of value.
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