Triaging Values:

In the past decades, value-led organizations and networks have assumed a greater role in processes of governance, that is in processes that affect the distribution of material and symbolic resources. They act as mediators in our responses to a number of social and political problems and provide for needs in a number of different policy areas.
For "Triaging Values", I will be conducting interviews with managers in value-led organizations to investigate the ways in which they make decisions about how to allocate resources, and how to manage their commitments to specific causes, specific people and specific territorial units.

The term triage comes initially from emergency medicine, where it describes the process by which doctors decide whom to treat first, based on medical need but also based on chances of survival. But processes further upstream also entail triage and have a potentially larger impact on the distribution of resources. The problem of triage is a specific challenge for value-driven organizations: The values themselves usually do not lend themselves easily to prioritization. Pragmatic decisions about effectiveness usually involve complex knowledge-claims about the world and the effects of intervention within it, and criteria for success in non-profits defy easy calculation. The problem of triage is especially interesting in organizations committed to universal or global values, because these values guide triage even less.

Humanitarian relief NGOs, human rights organizations, environmental conservation agencies and Christian churches are all are committed to values that are universal, or global in ambition. How do these organizations allocate resources to specific areas, and specific groups of beneficiaries and specific types of activities? What are the time-frames of allocating resources, measuring results, and managing staff and partners? What are knowledge-claims involved and how are these resolved? What is the role of ideas? What moral dilemmas arise for actors involved in these decisions and how do they manage these dilemmas? Middle-managers are a strategic group to interview, because they sit in-between incoming and outgoing funds, and asking them about their own day-to-day practices provides key insights into the workings of the larger organization.

In this way, the project will generate a map of the possible ways in which value-driven organizations deal with dilemmas of triage and it will generate data about how practices are distributed among different organizations; it will establish how ideas, management tools, controversies about knowledge and organizational constraints affect provision. It will offer new understandings of how territoriality and space is managed by non-state organizations.

Bridging sociological subfields through a comparative perspective, the project will contribute to the development of sociology as a progressive research programme. It will contribute to recasting our knowledge of political order based on the interdisciplinary systematic comparative investigation of practices. By uncovering taken-for-granted aspects of organizational practices in the context of other possible practices, the project will contribute to a more informed debate about choices for policy makers, managers and the general public.

The project's research brings together conversations around tough choices, and more specifically around tough new choices, in a number of fields. These choices have profound ethical and ideological and political implications and the project will greatly enhance the analytical and empirical basis for our capacity to understand, reflect on and improve the way these choices are actually made.

Among the non-academic beneficiaries of the research are, first, professionals and activists in the fields that will be studied, second, donors to these organizations and third, members of the wider public.

Relief workers, human rights lawyers, human rights professionals and human rights activists, conservation activists and scientists, and the leadership and membership of churches will find the findings of this research of interest. They can use the findings of the study to situate their own experience in a wider context and reflect more on the triage aspects of their practice and their implications. This is not to imply that many of these practitioners are not already highly reflexive. But by comparing their own practice to other, similar but different contexts, both within their own fields and across the different areas of the study, they can reflect on the organizational and value-based underpinnings of the choices they make on a more informed basis. Comparison to other, real existing practices, can also help practitioners become aware of previously unconsidered alternative ways of dealing with triage. Findings can be integrated in discussion about organizational policy on a senior level in these organizations; they will also be prepared for use in training for junior practitioners.

Second, donors to these organizations will find this research of interest. This includes public and state bodies, such as the Department for International Development and the European Community Humanitarian Office, private and philanthropic foundations, and members of the public. The public delegates important choices - about life-saving drugs, about legal services, about the importance of one species or another, or the importance of one parish or another to these organizations - and has a stake in how their aims and values are being taking forward by these organizations.

Third, based on the findings of the study, I want to fully engage broader public debates about how we should respond to disasters, how we can further human rights, how we can protect the environment and about the future and role of religious organizations. I also want to engage the debate about the role of value-based organizations, in relation to the role of the state on the one hand and the market on the other, more generally. The research will provide often-unique insights into the practices of these organizations. The public benefit of this work will be in demystifying and making publicly accessible a series of insight based on empirical data, which will allow reflection based on the organizational dimension of some of our most ambitious responses to social problems and challenges.