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Is "community" in America in decline? If so, does this mean that charitable giving in the United States is also in decline? In this innovative and original work, Emily Barman offers new insights into this important issue. Analyzing workplace charity in different cities across the United States, Contesting Communities shows that while traditional notions of community might be in decline, new types and visions of community have emerged. Barman traces how these different "communities" take the form of organizational competition between the United Way and new alternative fundraisers over workplace contributions. Deftly blending sociological theory of organizations with archival research, interviews with nonprofit leaders, and original survey data, Contesting Communities ultimately shows that the meaning of community occurs almost incidentally to the wishes of those who give and the needs of those who receive

"Companies are increasingly championed for their capacity to solve social problems. Yet what happens when such goods as water, education, and health are sold by companies - rather than donated by nonprofits - to the disadvantaged and when the pursuit of mission becomes entangled with the pursuit of profit? In Caring Capitalism, Emily Barman answers these important questions, showing how the meaning of social value in an era of caring capitalism gets mediated by the work of 'value entrepreneurs' and the tools they create to gauge companies' social impact. By shedding light on these pivotal actors and the cultural and material contexts in which they operate, Caring Capitalism accounts for the unexpected consequences of this new vision of the market for the pursuit of social value. Proponents and critics of caring capitalism alike will find the book essential reading"--

This article considers the construction of the market of Impact Investing – financial investment with the intentional pursuit of "impact" alongside financial return – as one case of the broader turn to Social Finance. Impact Investing is championed by proponents for its ability to provide a sustainable and scalable market-based solution to societal and environmental problems, in contrast to the limited efforts of government and civil society. This article delineates the work of the market maker who motivated the construction of a judgment device to address the issue of quality uncertainty in this new market. I offer a genealogy of this rating system for firms as potential impact investments, showing that it was commissioned by proponents of Impact Investing who, having first engaged in boundary work to distinguish Impact Investing from other spaces of Social Finance, then sought to appeal to traditional investors by mimicking the calculative tools used in traditional capital markets. Yet, the adaptation of a financial rating system to the new field was complicated by the multivocal status of "impact" as a boundary object involving multiple, disparate actors committed to the common project of creating a judgement device for impact investment yet diverging on the question of how impact was to be created by businesses and for whose benefit. The result was a slippage between the conception of impact espoused by the market maker of Impact Investing and the type of impact gauged by the rating system itself, with likely reactive effects for impact investors and investees. I conclude by positing that the development of suitable judgement devices that capture and communicate the impact of socially or environmentally oriented financial activity is one critical yet understudied condition for the ability of social finance markets to achieve their promise.

This article considers the construction of the market of Impact Investing – financial investment with the intentional pursuit of "impact" alongside financial return – as one case of the broader turn to Social Finance. Impact Investing is championed by proponents for its ability to provide a sustainable and scalable market-based solution to societal and environmental problems, in contrast to the limited efforts of government and civil society. This article delineates the work of the market maker who motivated the construction of a judgment device to address the issue of quality uncertainty in this new market. I offer a genealogy of this rating system for firms as potential impact investments, showing that it was commissioned by proponents of Impact Investing who, having first engaged in boundary work to distinguish Impact Investing from other spaces of Social Finance, then sought to appeal to traditional investors by mimicking the calculative tools used in traditional capital markets. Yet, the adaptation of a financial rating system to the new field was complicated by the multivocal status of "impact" as a boundary object involving multiple, disparate actors committed to the common project of creating a judgement device for impact investment yet diverging on the question of how impact was to be created by businesses and for whose benefit. The result was a slippage between the conception of impact espoused by the market maker of Impact Investing and the type of impact gauged by the rating system itself, with likely reactive effects for impact investors and investees. I conclude by positing that the development of suitable judgement devices that capture and communicate the impact of socially or environmentally oriented financial activity is one critical yet understudied condition for the ability of social finance markets to achieve their promise.

Philanthropy—private giving for public purposes by individuals, corporations, and foundations—is a widespread activity. Scholarship on philanthropy is long-standing and can be traced to competing theorizations of gift-giving, wherein the gift has been framed as a case of altruism, self-interest, or reciprocity. Much of the resulting scholarship, in the disciplines of anthropology, economics, evolutionary biology, and psychology, has retained a focus on emphasizing actors' motivations for the scope and scale of philanthropy. Although sociologists have entered into the study of philanthropy more recently, they nonetheless have made important contributions to its understanding by drawing attention to the social bases of philanthropy. Sociologists have done so through the study of the micro-, meso-, and macro-level factors that explain variation in philanthropy; the specification of the institutional and legal arrangements that permit philanthropy; and the delineation of the social contexts that shape the direction and consequences of philanthropy.

AbstractThis paper reviews the use of field theory in the sociological study of the non‐profit sector. The review first shows how field theory, as a conceptual framework to explain social action, provides a valuable sociological counterweight to prevailing economic and psychological orientations in the interdisciplinary scholarship on the non‐profit sector. However, despite its certain shared assumptions, field theory in sociology encompasses three distinct, albeit interrelated, approaches: the Bourdieusian, New Institutionalist, and Strategic Action Fields perspectives. I comparatively outline the key analytical assumptions and causal claims of each version of field theory, whether and how it recognizes the specificity of the non‐profit sector and then delineate its application by sociologists to the non‐profit sector. I show how scholars' employment of each articulation of field theory to study non‐profit activity has been influenced by pre‐existing scholarly assumptions and normative claims about this third space. The article concludes by summarizing the use of these varieties of field theory in the sociology of the non‐profit sector and by identifying future directions in this line of research.

Impact investing-investment with the intentional expectation of social or environmental impact alongside financial return-constitutes one of a growing array of "concerned markets" where economic exchange is employed as a means to pursue financial and social or environmental value. Drawing from the pragmatist turn in valuation studies, this article attends to the valuation work that took place in the formation of this new market, examining how market proponents as evaluators recognized, defined, and negotiated the presence of value complexity in impact investing. I frame the market of impact investing as a case of market design complete with experiments, one in which advocates produced a valuation infrastructure so as to address investors' difficulty in ascertaining the social and environmental value - as a distinct regime of value from financial value - of an investment. These experimenters extended judgment devices from mainstream finance to construct calculative tools in this setting that permitted the social or environmental value of investments to be brought into being and to be made calculable for investors without being assigned a financial value. The study contributes to literature that theorizes the conditions underlying evaluators' mediation of the multiple registers of value at work in the making of markets.

Donors' ability to attach strings to their contributions has become increasingly prevalent in the nonprofit sector. Using the case of workplace charity, this article examines the determinants of nonprofit organizations' adoption of donor choice as a mode of fund-raising. Drawing from a nationwide survey, it tests three competing tenets to explain United Ways' implementation of donor choice. Employing logistic regression analysis, the findings indicate that United Ways allow for donor control when facing donors' demands for choice, regardless of the composition of the local market or fundraisers' organizational characteristics.