What is Social Value? 5 Ways Businesses Can Get Started
Posted on Thursday 5 March 2026
At its simplest, social value is about this:
How your business makes a positive difference to people, society and the natural environment - alongside making a profit.
It’s about the difference you make, intentionally or otherwise. Every organisation creates social value in some form. The real question is whether you’re doing it consciously and consistently.
Five Ways to Think About Social Value
Part of the confusion around social value comes from the fact that people use the term in different ways. A 2025 research paper in the Journal of Business Ethics by Marcelo de la Cruz Jara and Jelena Spanjol analysed 288 peer‑reviewed articles across 60 academic journals. Their systematic review showed that social value isn’t a single, fixed idea. Instead, it can be understood through five distinct lenses. (A systematic review is a rigorous method that pulls together and evaluates existing research in a structured way, so the findings aren’t based on opinion, but on evidence.)
Understanding those different perspectives helps you decide what social value means in your own organisation and how to put it into practice.
1. The Big Picture: The Maximising Approach
This perspective looks at your organisation’s overall impact on people, communities and the natural environment as one interconnected system.
It’s not just about customers, shareholders or a single community project, but the whole ecosystem your organisation touches.
These types of businesses tend to focus on:
- Long-term sustainability
- Reducing environmental harm
- Creating net positive impact
- Contributing to the overall wellbeing of society
The key question here is: How does what we do improve the bigger picture?
If your business is thinking beyond short-term returns and considering its role in strengthening society and the planet as a whole, you are working through this lens.
2. The Targeted Impact: The Stakeholder Approach
This approach centres around your audience. Who do you want to help?
It might be:
- Employees
- Local communities
- Young people
- Vulnerable groups
- Customers with specific needs
Lots of social enterprises operate this way by designing products and services aimed at solving clearly defined problems.
If your organisation identifies a specific need and builds a solution around it, you’re creating social value through a stakeholder lens.
3. The Values-Driven Business: The Virtuous Approach
Here, your motivation matters. Social value is created because it’s the right thing to do. It’s rooted in:
- Ethical leadership
- Clear values
- A sense of responsibility
It’s not because it looks good or because regulation demands it.
If your decisions are guided by “This is who we are” not by “This is what’s required,” you’re following the virtuous approach.
4. The Individual Experience: The Individualistic Approach
This perspective focuses on the real, lived experience of individual people. Social value is created when someone genuinely benefits. This might look like:
- Improved wellbeing
- Increased confidence or empowerment
- Better access to services
- A genuine improvement in quality of life
Here, your impact is personal. If someone can say, “This organisation made my life better,” social value has been created.
5. The Rules and Standards: The Normative Approach
Finally, some businesses focus on the standards and principles that guide behaviour, including:
- Codes of conduct
- Governance structures
- Ethical frameworks
- Organisational culture
Social value is embedded in how things are done - the systems, expectations and everyday practices that shape behaviour across the whole organisation.
Why This Matters for Your Business
In practice, many organisations blend a number of these approaches together. The difficulty comes when businesses say they are creating social value without being clear on what they actually mean.
- Are you aiming to improve the whole system?
- Focusing on a particular group?
- Choosing to do what’s right, even when it’s not required?
- Paying attention to how individuals are genuinely affected?
- Or strengthening the way your business or organisation operates behind the scenes?
Being clear about this makes a real difference. Once you understand the lens you’re working through, your strategy becomes more focused and easier to put into practice. That’s when social value stops being a buzzword and starts becoming part of how your organisation genuinely operates.
How is social value delivered day to day?
When you look at how different organisations approach social value, three practical areas tend to stand out.
- Through the work your organisation does
Your products, services, business model and partnerships all influence the impact you create. Social value can be built into what you offer or emerge naturally from the way you operate day-to-day.
- Through leadership decisions
When leaders put long‑term impact, fairness and responsibility at the heart of their decision-making, social value becomes part of the organisation’s direction rather than something seen as an add-on.
- Through systems and policies
Recruitment, supply chains, environmental commitments and governance structures all shape whether good intentions turn into real outcomes.
Who Benefits?
It’s useful to be specific about who your social value is intended to support. In most cases, the people or groups who benefit fall into three areas:
- The wider society and the natural environment
- Particular groups you want to support
- Individual people whose lives are directly affected
Being clear about this makes it easier to measure success and work out where you should focus your efforts.
So, what should you do?
If you want to put social value into practice, these steps are a good place to start.
Choose your perspective. Are you aiming for system‑level change, supporting a particular group, improving individual outcomes or strengthening ethical leadership?
Be clear about who benefits most from your work. The more specific you are, the easier it becomes to focus your efforts.
Check that you’re aligned. Do your policies, leadership decisions and business model genuinely reflect the social value you say you create?
Social value has the greatest impact when it’s part of everyday thinking and decision‑making, not treated as a separate project on the side.
A Note on the Evidence
The approaches outlined in this article are grounded in a systematic review of 288 peer-reviewed academic articles examining how social value is defined and applied in business research. If you would like to explore this in more depth, you can read:
de la Cruz Jara, M. F., & Spanjol, J. (2024). Understanding Multiple Perspectives on Social Value in Business: An Integrative Review and Typology.
But you don’t need to read the paper to act on the insight. The key message is simple: Social value isn’t one thing. It’s a choice about the kind of impact you want your business or organisation to have - and the more intentional you are about that choice, the more meaningful your business becomes.