A political economy of social impact measurement

Evaluating social impact is more and more becoming established as a major cognitive reference point and as a coordination mechanism.Numerous empirical researches allow us to interpret the emergence of “social impact” as a new substitute for the idea of productivity and performance. Rather than producing a radical critique of these ideas, the paper aims to encapsulate this observation in a longer perspective. Evaluation has always existed, but its modalities have been deeply modified and have become more and more subject to heteronomy, quantification, standardization, and globalization. Public services and more generally the welfare state are no longer immune to this, nor are social economies. The need for measurement of social impact results from concomitant changes which include the mutation of production and the rise of services, and the increase and change (in volume, nature and ends) in evaluation of public policies. Behind the evaluation tools that underpin the discourses and representations of what “effective” means, actors whose function it is to carry out evaluations accord themselves the right to determine objectives previously regarded as public policies, despite avowedly distancing themselves from the political sphere.