Uncovering the social processes of impact measurement: Insights from the evaluation of United Kingdom's Coventry City of Culture 2021

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"A particular challenge for the publicly funded arts, culture and heritage sector is how to ... [measure] the impact of their artistic, cultural and social value creation" - AHRC Warwick Commission, 2015, p.24.Cultural institutions in the UK and beyond increasingly depend on social impact measurement (SIM) of arts and cultural programs in order to determine how best to tackle inequalities in participation and engagement; to render programs more relevant to diverse individuals; to enhance investment in the industry; to improve and tailor programs for given regional and demographic circumstances; and to ensure positive legacy effects such as social cohesion and civic pride. SIM is the process of defining and expressing changes-in human condition (physical, mental, emotional, artistic, cultural, and spiritual) that result from organizational operations and interventions. The demand for SIM has never been greater, as policymakers, investors, and industry leaders are calling out for information that helps them understand, plan for, monitor, and evidence positive contributions to societal progress. Access to reliable and timely SIM depends extensively on frontline stakeholders responsible for the actual delivery of impact work, such as social enterprises, employees, and community members who design, deliver, and receive social impact programs on behalf of governments, investors, and businesses. Yet, these frontline stakeholders are struggling to adopt, apply, and learn from the range of SIM approaches emerging on the market. While there has been a proliferation of sophisticated SIM methods generated from policymakers, investors, and academics, significantly less work has considered the social processes of SIM methods, especially at the frontline.Social processes are the ways in which individuals and groups relate, react, adjust, and readjust to phenomenon. Unpacking the social processes of SIM are essential to helping the domain advance, as it is key to understanding which behaviors drive and hinder adoption, implementation, and learning. Using phenomenological analysis, stakeholder interviews and diaries, as well as observations, this study will unpack how stakeholders of the United Kingdom's Coventry City of Culture 2021 - frontline beneficiaries, employees, managers, evaluators, and impact analysts - react, interpret and adjust to a range of established and newer, qualitative and quantitative, SIM approaches. The results of this study stand to contribute to the development of SIM theory, by explicating the hereto understudied social processes. This project will also provide critical practical insight on how to best design and enact SIM for frontline actor engagement and benefit. In turn, it will benefit wider society by enabling social impact stakeholders to gain better access to and learning from SIM processes so that impact efforts can flourish and thrive.