Social Impact Evaluation: Integrating Caring, Effectual, and Relational Theories to Understand How Social Enterprises Respond to Conflicting Demands and Constraints

Abstract

Social impact evaluation is considered as an important tool enabling social enterprises to legitimise their existence and contribution to society. Attending to multiple goals and operating in a complex setting, social enterprises typically face diverse expectations when they seek to evaluate social impact. Although common agreement as to what constitutes an ideal social impact evaluation approach has not been reached, social enterprises are increasingly called upon to adopt sophisticated assessment metrics to demonstrate social impact accurately and objectively. Moving beyond the perception that social impact evaluation is a managerial tool providing precise and quantifiable measures of social outcomes, this thesis re-conceptualises social impact evaluation as a socially constructed phenomenon that needs to be understood in its contexts. The thesis reviews extant social impact evaluation research in three different contexts: (1) social enterprises’ care to the welfare of people in need; (2) social enterprises’ constraints; and (3) relationships between social enterprises and resource providers. From this review, three gaps are evidenced: (1) the underdevelopment of social impact evaluation research in the social entrepreneurship domain; (2) the lack of coherent theories to understand the complex nature of social impact evaluation; and (3) the narrow setting of empirical data in social impact evaluation research. The study focuses on answering three research questions: (1) what are the multiple contexts in which social impact evaluation takes place? (2) How do social enterprises respond to social impact evaluation in these contexts? (3) What theoretical frames can help us better understand social impact evaluation? The research utilises three theoretical frames: care, effectuation, and social relations to explore social impact evaluation in different contexts. Specifically, care theory is used to understand social impact evaluation in the context of social enterprises’ concerns about the wellbeing of people in need. Effectuation theory is applied to explore social impact evaluation in the constrained circumstances of social enterprises. Social relations theories are employed to understand social impact evaluation in the relationships between social enterprises and resource providers. These are then integrated to present a cohesive theoretical frame for the study. The research utilises a multiple case study design with four social enterprises in Vietnam. The primary data derives from 45 interviews with social entrepreneurs, resource providers, beneficiaries and other stakeholders. The research show that facing multiple goals and requirements, social enterprises collectively employ different behavioural logics to respond to social impact evaluation requirements. Specifically, to understand the wellbeing of people in need, social enterprises evaluate social impact continuously through purposeful observations, regular interactions and thorough reflections to appreciate the subtle and significant changes to their beneficiaries at the time or over time. In order to counter constraints associated with social impact evaluation, social enterprises adopt an effectuation logic as the basis of action. They ‘make do’ with the available resources they can afford, creatively applying alternative evaluation approaches, looking for assistance from partners and even ‘pushing back’ from perceived inappropriate assessment requests. Simultaneously, to sustain relationships, social enterprises react differently to social impact evaluation depending on the symmetric or asymmetric relationships they have with resource providers. The thesis provides a more comprehensive understanding of the dynamics and complexity of social impact evaluation in the diverse settings of social entrepreneurship. Social impact evaluation is characterised as caring, effectual and relational practices. The findings advance our understanding of social impact evaluation by showing that social impact evaluation is not a linear and causal process that can be done with objective and quantifiable metrics. The key contribution of the research is the way in which it accounts for the contextualisation of the phenomenon under investigation by proposing an integrative frame rooted in the care, effectuation and social relation literatures. This integrative theoretical frame moves beyond a perspective on social impact evaluation as a technical and asocial activity to view it as a dynamic, socially constructed and contextually bounded phenomenon. More generally, and perhaps more importantly, the research responds to recent calls for more attention to pressures and conflicting demands in order to understand social enterprises by taking into account the tensions and challenges associated with social impact evaluation inquiry.