Emily Barman

The National Congregations Study : Background, methods, and selected results

The National Congregations Study (NCS) was conducted in conjunction with the 1998 General Social Survey (GSS). The 1998 GSS asked respondents who attend religious services to name their religious congregation, thus generating a nationally representative sample of religious congregations. Data about these congregations were collected via a one-hour interview with one key informant - a minister, priest, rabbi, or other staff person or leader - from 1236 congregations. Information was gathered about multiple aspects of congregationssocial composition, structure, activities, and programming. This article describes NCS methodology and presents selected univariate results in four areas: denominational ties, size, political activities, and worship practices.

How Organizational Stakeholders Shape Performance Measurement in Nonprofits Exploring a Multidimensional Measure

Research on performance measurement by nonprofit organizations increasingly focuses on the use of outcome measurement (OM) to assess organizational effectiveness. This article applies a strategic choice framework to analyze how nonprofit managers’ evaluation of the importance of organizational stakeholders is associated with patterns of OM. The article introduces a multidimensional measure of nonprofits’ implementation of OM that incorporates its extent of program use, as well as whether resources are specifically allocated for this evaluative practice. This multidimensional measure is examined using data from a new survey of service providing nonprofits in the city of Boston. Our multivariate analysis investigates how three sets of influences—resource providers, networks, and internal stakeholders—impact patterns of OM. The findings indicate that the factors driving program use (internal stakeholders) are distinct from those that impact resource allocation (resource providers).

An Institutional Approach to Donor Control: From Dyadic Ties to a Field‐Level Analysis

Literature on the nonprofit sector focuses on charities and their interactions with clients or governmental agencies; donors are studied less often. Studies on philanthropy do examine donors but tend to focus on microlevel factors to explain their behavior. This study, in contrast, draws on institutional theory to show that macrolevel factors affect donor behavior. It also extends the institutional framework by examining the field‐level configurations in which donors and fundraisers are embedded. Employing the case of workplace charity, this new model highlights how the composition of the organizational field structures fundraisers and donors alike, shaping fundraisers’ strategies of solicitation and, therefore, the extent of donor control.

Sequence Comparison Via Alignment and Gibbs Sampling: A Formal Analysis of the Emergence of the Modern Sociological Article

Various substantive literatures in sociology seek small regularities in sequences: turning points in the life course, catalytic moments in organizational change, sharp turns in occupational trajectories, and the like. Commonly these are turning points, but they may also be simple local patterns. This paper reports a method for discovering such regularities even when they are quite faint, applying that method to rhetorical regularities in sociological articles. The paper begins by analyzing the overall sequence structure of such articles and then gives a basic introduction to Gibbs sampling, one member of the broader class of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. It then reports an algorithm employing Gibbs sampling to find local sequence regularities and applies that algorithm to demonstrate the subsequence regularities present in sociological articles. Substantively, the paper shows that the rhetorical structure of sociological articles changed from one pattern to another in the period 1895–1965 and that certain faint but standard rhetorical subsequences became characteristic of articles in the later period. Methodologically, it introduces a broad class of methods that provide effective approaches to a number of previously intractable statistical questions.

Who and What Really Counts? Stakeholder Prioritization and Accounting for Social Value

Research in stakeholder management has theorized extensively the prioritization of stakeholders as a key dynamic of firms’ value creation, but has paid less attention to the organizational practices involved in the process of deciding ‘who and what really counts.’ We examine changes underpinning managers’ prioritization of stakeholders and focus on how managers’ attention to salient stakeholders is represented and communicated in a firms accounting and reporting system. We study the emergence and development of Social Return on Investment (SROI): an accounting methodology intended to permit managers both to incorporate stakeholders’ voices and to communicate the social value created by the firm for those stakeholders. We find that the ability of SROI to account for specific stakeholders, thus categorizing them as salient for the firm, is shaped by managers’ epistemic beliefs and by the organizations material conditions. Our findings contribute to stakeholder theory by showing that the prioritization of stakeholders is not solely a managerial decision, but instead is dependent on the construction of an appropriate accounting and reporting system, as shaped by managers’ epistemic beliefs and by the organizations material conditions.

Of Principle and Principal: Value Plurality in the Market of Impact Investing

Impact investing—investment with the intentional expectation of social or environmental impact alongside �耀nancial return—constitutes one of a growing array of “concerned markets” where economic exchange is employed as a means to pursue �耀nancial 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, de�耀ned, 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’ dif�耀culty in ascertaining the social and environmental value—as a distinct regime of value from �耀nancial value—of an investment. These experimenters extended judgment devices from mainstream �耀nance 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 �耀nancial 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.

Public or private? The role of the state and civil society in health and health inequalities across nations

Social scientists have long recognized that macro-level factors have the potential to shape the health of populations and individuals. Along these lines, they have theorized about the role of the welfare state in creating more equal opportunities and outcomes and how this intervention may benefit health. More recently, scholars and policymakers alike have pointed out how the involvement of civil society actors may replace or complement any state effort. Using data from the World Values Surveys and the European Values Study, combined with national-level indicators for welfare state and civil society involvement, we test the impact of each sector on health and health inequalities in 25 countries around the world. We find that both have a statistically significant effect on overall health, but the civil society sector may have a greater independent influence in societies with weaker welfare states. The health inequalities results are less conclusive, but suggest a strong civil society may be particularly beneficial to vulnerable populations, such as the low income and unemployed. Our paper represents an early step in providing empirical evidence for the impact of the welfare state and civil society on health and health inequalities.

ORGANIZATIONAL GENESIS IN THE NONPROFIT SECTOR: AN ANALYSIS OF DEMAND, SUPPLY, AND COMMUNITY CHARACTERISTICS

Scholarly knowledge of organizational founding in the nonprofit sector has grown not from macro-level analyses but rather from the aggregation of in-depth and focused studies of particular geographical regions or service fields. Employing logistic regression techniques, this paper examines the formation of nonprofits in one key but overlooked site of the voluntary sector: workplace charity. Testing competing theories, the paper analyzes the effect of demand-side, supply-side, and community-level characteristics on the presence of rival federated fundraisers in the largest 123 MSAs in 2000. The results indicate that these nonprofit organizations are formed in large cities with a sizeable and stable nonprofit sector, regardless of ease of access to charitable contributions and the level of available funding.