(Illustration by Adam Mccaule)
What happens to nonprofit workers when they are suddenly compelled to quantify and report the impact of their work? A new working paper by Julia Morley, an accounting lecturer at the London School of Economics, finds that social-sector employees can, as a result, feel alienated from their identities and their jobs.
To think about this problem, Morley introduces a new idea, which she dubs “description-value dissonance, which refers to the discursive deflection of an organization from its core objectives,” she writes. Nonprofits often require social-impact reports that use language imported from business, finance, accounting, and corporate human resources. This requirement causes employees to feel estranged from their own values and the purported values of their organizations.
Morley started to research this question as she was doing work on social-impact reporting. While nonprofit consultants, foundations, and other funders talked about business-style impact reporting in a positive way, the nonprofits receiving the funding and generating the reporting were much less positive about it, she says. What she found was a subtle problem.
“The language that was used in social-impact reporting tends to be quite abstract and statistical, which is very different from the emotional, empathetic, narrative accounts that tend to be otherwise provided by nonprofit organizations,” she says.
For the study, Morley gained access to a nonprofit in New York and two in London, interviewed 93 workers in the nonprofit sector in long, semi-structured interviews, and directly observed two participants at work. Employees were shown descriptions of their jobs and then asked to talk about how social-impact reporting made them feel. They said they were put off by the language used because it challenged their view that they were helping people, Morley says.
For instance, a youth worker might feel that her job is about helping her young clients to cope, flourish, and contribute to society. She might help clients find a job or get off the street, but those goals are short-term and do not capture the long-term relationship the worker hopes to develop with her charges. Social-impact investors, on the other hand, may be primarily concerned with the number of jobs clients have started or the number of people moved out of homelessness. This creates a clash for the workers.
“They desperately want to create impact, but the way impact is understood by external stakeholders is dissonant with their values,” Morley says. “In fact, I still found that when there was an awareness by staff that this was primarily to satisfy funders, they would say, ‘I understand it’s important to demonstrate impact so that we can get money and I can still be here next year, but I feel uncomfortable with the way my role is being described.’”
Morley’s main contribution to the field in this study is the idea of description-value dissonance, says Alex Nicholls, professor of social entrepreneurship at University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School. The literature has a decade’s worth of research on social-impact investing and hybrid organizations, but what’s new in Morley’s work is her “focus on identity and the individual,” he says. “She’s done good work looking at these individuals and how their values have been challenged by these systems they’ve had to adopt.”
The implications of the study could reverberate throughout the social-service sector. Because of this split between an organization’s stated mission and the
business-like social impact reporting it’s now doing, “the managers are the ones who are in a very difficult bind,” Morley says. They have to handle the front-line workers’ discomfort with the organization’s messaging to the funders and social-impact investors who insist on this reporting.
“[Managers] need to think carefully about how they present some of the requirements to front-line staff about the recording of outcomes,” she says.
This article appeared in the Fall 2019 issue of the magazine with the headline: "The Alienation of Impact Reporting"
Read more stories by Chana R. Schoenberger.