Evaluating the social value of charitable organizations : a conceptual foundation

Charities are becoming more businesslike in their quest to address competitive pressures and funding reductions. However, this shift may have unintended consequences. For example, the best-marketed charities are not necessarily the ones with the greatest potential for social benefit. There is currently no mechanism that attempts to evaluate the social value of charities. Borrowing from social investing and corporate social responsibility literature, the authors argue that despite the difficulties inherent in this task, there are several issues that must be considered to assess a charity's social value, and each stakeholder will consider some dimensions of social value differently. Assessing a charity's social value has several ethical and policy implications, especially given the level of governmental and foundational support for charity organizations.

The institutional foundation of materialism in western societies

Studies of materialism have increased in recent years, and most of these studies examine various aspects of materialism including its individual or social consequences. However, understanding, and possibly shaping, a society’s materialistic tendencies requires a more complete study of the relationship between a society’s institutional patterns and the acceptance of materialism by its members. Consequently, the current study examines five of the institutional antecedents of materialism to understand better how and why it develops as a mode of consumption within a society. More specifically, a model relating materialism and a set of institutionalized patterns of social behavior referred to as the dominant social paradigm was developed and tested in a study of seven industrial, market-based countries. The results suggest that the economic, technological, political, anthropocentric, and competition institutions making up the dominant social paradigm are all positively related to materialism. The implications of the relationship are then discussed.