Developing a Conceptual Framework for Comparing Social Value Creation

Abstract

The soaring popularity of business practices in the social sector has elicited numerous calls from academics and practitioners to adopt appropriate methodologies to quantify and compare social value creation. Contributing scholars consider it a great if not impossible challenge to compare social value creation of different, unrelated heterogonous interventions. We help bridge this research gap by developing a conceptual framework that allows us to compare the effectiveness of social interventions serving the different needs of different treatment groups in different socioeconomic and institutional contexts. We do so by bringing insights from both the literature on subjective well-being and the literature on organizational effectiveness theory into not-for-profit and social entrepreneurship research, as well as into the literature on program evaluation.