This paper outlines the merits of two approaches to social impact measurement that are currently the subject of debate within the third sector: Social Accounting & Audit (SAA) and Social Return On Investment (SROI). Although there are significant similarities between the methods, a number of important differences remain. In particular, while SAA involves a more "conventional" mix of narrative and quantitative disclosures, SROI outcomes are more explicitly quantitative and reductive. This is most evident in the production of the "SROI ratio", which calculates a monetised "return" on a notional £1 of investment. In the UK, with available resources becoming increasingly scarce, the third sector is facing demands for increased accountability as well as being encouraged to "scale up" in preparation for assuming greater responsibility for public service delivery. In this context, it is easy to see why the simplicity and clarity of SROI is attractive to policy-makers, fundraisers and investors, who are keen to quantify and express social value creation and thus make comparative assessments of social value. However, this apparent simplicity also risks reducing the measurement of social impact to a potentially meaningless, or even misleading headline figure, and should therefore be treated with caution. This is especially so where exact measures are unobtainable, and approximations, or so-called "financial proxies" are used. The use of such proxies is highly subjective, especially when dealing with "softer" outcomes. There is nothing to prevent SROI being used within an SAA framework: indeed a greater emphasis on quantitative data could improve many social accounts. Nevertheless, we conclude that current efforts to promote SROI adoption, to the likely detriment of SAA, may ultimately promote a onedimensional funder and investor-driven approach to social impact measurement in the third sector.Word count: 4938

The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Jane Gibbon is a senior researcher in the area of Corporate Responsibility, Accountability and Governance in Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University. She has published in social and environmental accounting, external reporting and accountability, gender issues and environmental policy. She is working on a PhD in social accounting under the supervision of Professor Jan Bebbington, University of St. Andrews.Richard Slack is a Principal Lecturer in Accounting, and his main academic roles are within postgraduate programmes. His research interests are corporate philanthropy and the role of business in society. As well as Fair Trade research he is currently working on papers in relation to strategic company giving and associated disclosure and also the role of football clubs in society. Accepted for publication in Journal of Strategic Marketing.Please do not cite without authors' permission. 2The mainstreaming of Fair Trade: a macromarketing perspective AbstractFollowing a brief review of the development and underlying purposes of the Fair Trade movement, the paper introduces perhaps the key issue for the U.K. Fair Trade movement currently: the mainstreaming of Fair Trade food products. The macromarketing literature, with its focus on sustainable consumption, ecocentrism and a consequent need to change the dominant social paradigm, is used as a framework for analysing the findings of an empirical study of this mainstreaming process involving interviews with and case study material from both Fair Trade organisations and the major supermarkets which have engaged with Fair Trade. The key question that the paper addresses is whether Fair Trade, particularly as it enters mainstream markets, provides an exemplar, from within the existing dominant social paradigm, of the kinds of actions that the macromarketing literature suggests are necessary to enable sustainable consumption. Implications for both the Fair Trade movement and for macromarketing are drawn out.

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The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. AbstractThis paper develops a set of 16 criteria, divided into four groupings, for responsible business practice (RBP) in Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) drawn from the existing SME/RBP literature. The current lack of a general set of criteria against which such activity can be judged is noted and this deficit is redressed. In order to make an initial assessment in support of the criteria so derived, an exploratory feasibility study of RBP in U.K. Fair Trade organisations was conducted. The findings from this study show that most but not all of the RBP criteria seem to be applicable to U.K. Fair Trade organisations but it is recommended that the complete set of criteria continues to be used in further research until such time as there is a general consensus as to which criteria are appropriate. Implications for RBP in small businesses in general, and for Fair Trade organisations in particular, are drawn out and suggestions for further research are identified.