Construire l’évaluation de l’impact social dans les organisations à but non lucratif : instrumentation de gestion et dynamiques de rationalisation

Thesis to be defended on the 18th of december at 2:00pm at Campus de l'École polytechnique, bâtiment ENSTA, 828 Boulevard des Maréchaux 91120 Palaiseau in Amphi R.111.

This thesis focuses on how social impact assessment is built and implemented within not-for-profit organizations. A growing number of actors in the not-for-profit sector consider it necessary to measure the value produced by socially oriented organizations for accountability and monitoring use. Nevertheless, actors face with many questions about the content and the relevant tools to implement, in a context of tension between the influence of the lucrative field and the identity of not-for-profit organizations. Mobilizing the theoretical fields of performance measurement of not-for-profit organizations, management tools and the rationalization of organizations, the thesis focuses on the articulation between the technical aspects and the context of social impact measurement. To study these issues, the thesis is based on an intervention research within Apprentis d'Auteuil, a large French organization dedicated to young people at risk. The first result of the thesis proposes an analytical framework of social impact measurement based on a contingent and processual approach. The second result highlights the multi-rationality of social impact measurement in terms of judgment of external actors, the representation of the entity assessed and the evaluation process itself. The third result of the thesis is to show that the practice of social impact measurement has been deployed within the organization without any standardized evaluation tool, paving the way for an implementation of social impact measurement based on the adaptation to the specificities of not-for-profit activities that makes sense for organizational actors.

Keywords: third sector, social impact, evaluation, management tools, rationality, intervention research

Jury: