Developing Communities, Organizations, and Institutions to Create Social Value

There has been growing interest in the past decade in using organizational studies and management research to develop insight into contemporary societal challenges and issues. This has generated growing bodies of research on how corporations can address social issues or create social value. Despite the growing focus on social value creation by organizations, there is an uneasy question of what social value actually means, and how potentially diverse understandings of social value may be socially constructed and even negotiated. Early research on social value creation adopted a positivist approach, where the meaning of social value was defined by an organization that was running and assessing a program that aimed to deliver social value, or by an academic expert identifying measurable valuable outcomes. To fully understand and appreciate the organizational efforts and processes of social value creation, we examine the social construction of social value to complement the positivist and objectified views of social value. This symposium contributes to research on social value creation by pulling together four unpublished studies that look at the processes by which social value is constructed in different communities as well as the processes that unfold as efforts and initiatives to create social value lead to heterogeneity of meanings. The studies expand the existing view of social value creation by examining how organizations connect their nascent practices, processes, and outputs with interests and goals of communities, and thereby constituting them as valuable. By doing so, the studies expand the sociological understanding of values and evaluation at the heart of social entrepreneurship and organizing for positive social change. Enabling Collective Action in Violent Institutional Fields Presenter: Diana Trujillo; New York U. Presenter: Amit Nigam; City U. London Leveraging Social Impact Investing for Community Development Presenter: Tiffany Darabi; Cornell U. Crafting and Appropriating Social Value in a Nascent Non-Profit Organization Presenter: Henri Schildt; Aalto U. School of Business Presenter: Farah Kodeih; Aalto U. School of Business Multi-Layered Hybridity in Multistakeholder Cooperatives for the Public Interest: Creating Social, Economic and Democratic Value Presenter: Nevena Radoynovska; EMLYON Business School