The Nation4l Congregations Study (NCS) was ";ndUcted in~njunclion~ith the 1998 Ge~ral~~ial Survey (GSS). The 1998 GSS as/ud respondenl8 woo altend religious. s~rvr.ces 10 na~the" rel,lI'ous congregation, thus generating a nationally representative sampk of rel'gwUB congregat'o~.. Data about these congregaRoIUI wen collecud uia a one-hour interuuw with. OM key znformanta ffll1Uster. pru:st. rabbi, or other staff person or kcukrfrom 1236 congregations. Information w~g ather:d aJJ:>utmul~pk aspecl8 of congregations' social composition, structure, activities, and program":,ng: This .artr.c~de8C~S NCS methodology and presen18 sekcted uniuariote resull8 in four.areas: deTlOrmnat,onalttes, sue, politioal activilie.. and worship practices. i Congregations-the relatively small-scale,l~cal collectiviti~s~d Organiz~tions~~d through which people engage in religious activityare a basic umt~f Amencan~h~ous life. They are the primary site of religious ritual activity, they proVIde an orgamzational model followed even by religious groups new to this country, they provide sociability and community for many, they offer opportunities for political action and volu.ntarism: they foster religious identities through education and practice, and they engage m a vanety of community and social service activities (Warner 1994;, Wuthn~w 1991; V~rba et al. .1~~5; Hodgkinson and Weitzman 1992). This list does not exhaust either the kinds of acti'?~es conducted inside congregations or the ways in which cpngregations relate to commumties. Perhaps it is sufficient, however, to make a prima facie case that congregations~a significant organizational population whose internal features and extex:nal re~ations warrant close attention in their own right. Congregations also represent nch SOCIaland organizational~ttings in which a wide array of sociological questions may fruitfully be addressed.. .. Sociologists have, of course, long recognized congregations' significance as an orgamzational population and their potential as a research site. Although the study of congregations as units of analysis began, in the remarkable work of H. Paul Douglass and Edmund deS, Brunner, by combining case studies .with surveys of large numbers of congregations in a variety of denominations (see, for exanlple, Douglass and deS. Brunner

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 firm's 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 organization's 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 organization's material conditions.

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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.

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.