Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Although legitimacy is critical when attempting to introduce new practices in the nonprofit charity sector, little is known about individual processes of legitimation within such organizations, and how legitimacy emerges and interacts with perceived external pressures. This article investigates how charity organizational actors (using rhetorical arguments) linguistically legitimate/delegitimate new practices as a means of facilitating internal and external legitimacy. The study explores, as an example of organizational change in its early stages, newly-introduced accountability and reporting practices emanating from the current Charity Statement of Recommended Practice in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland. The findings show that external regulative and cognitive pressures can be assessed and legitimated as something rational and reasonable in cases where organizational actors perceive the change as “exploitable.” Moreover, they provide evidence of how different interpretations can foster implementation and action (or trigger inaction) and affect the introduction of business-like practices in the nonprofit sector.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This article is a comprehensive empirical overview of environmental protection and conservation nonprofits’ discourse on social media. To what extent have these nonprofits framed climate change in their public discourse and how has it evolved over time? How do organizational characteristics and resources affect their social media behavior? To address our research questions, we use machine learning with texts—specifically topic modeling—to track the activity of 120 environmental nonprofits during a 14-year time span on X, formerly known as Twitter. Our analysis of more than 1.3 million tweets shows that climate change, although not closely aligned with the missions for more than half of the top tweeting organizations included in our sample, has consistently been a prevalent priority issue on their social media agendas for more than a decade. This heightened attention to climate change discourse by the environmental nonprofit sector denotes their uniform efforts to inspire government for climate action.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This paper proposes a distinctive strategic model (Strategic Confrontational and Collaborative Interaction Model [SCCIM]) for nonprofit organizations acting within the business ecosystem. The SCCIM maps both confrontational and collaborative strategies and tactics, thus accommodating the extensive range of nonprofit interaction alternatives toward business. Whereas confrontational and collaborative methods are well researched in the nonprofit-political realm, a comprehensive overview of these nonprofit strategies in the economic sphere is currently lacking. This research builds on both the business management and social movement literature, extending existing approaches via case analysis with a nonprofit-centric perspective, leveraging stakeholder theory. The resulting encompassing model provides a theoretical framework that may generate alternative insights for further academic research in nonprofit–business interaction. In addition, the SCCIM may be leveraged as a tool for practitioners: first, to enhance nonprofits’ strategies and tactics toward business, and second, to optimize the impact of the chosen interactions.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Past empirical studies demonstrate a positive connection between revenue concentration and organizational efficiency. This supports the idea that concentrating revenue helps minimize transaction costs of nonprofit organizations, resulting in greater efficiency. However, this finding contradicts the belief that revenue concentration increases the risk of revenue volatility, leading to service delivery disruptions and reduced efficiency in nonprofits. Moreover, these studies have used an efficiency measure that might not be suitable. To address this, our study examines the relationship between revenue concentration and organizational efficiency using a more appropriate measure. Analyzing data from Habitat for Humanity, we discover a U-shaped relationship: nonprofits are most efficient when fully diverse or fully concentrated in revenue. These findings contribute to the ongoing debate on nonprofit revenue diversification, with significant implications for nonprofits. They also highlight the importance of using more appropriate efficiency measures in future scholarly research.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Collaborative engagement between international and local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) has recently been promoted as an effective strategy to enhance internal process strengths but less as a strategy to localize humanitarian aid programs; a grand strategy that aims to strengthen local capacity, develop local capabilities, and boost regional humanitarian project performance. While stakeholders deem to play an important role in leveraging the efficiencies of such collaborative engagements between international and local actors, there is limited empirical knowledge about how stakeholder pressure affects the association between the collaboration–performance association within international and local NGOs. Drawing on stakeholder theory, we propose a model to examine the role of donors, media, and governments, three major stakeholders noteworthy because of their power and legitimacy to moderate the collaboration–performance association in this NGO context. We test our hypotheses across a series of samples collected at both international and local NGOs in 2015 and 2020. From a practical perspective, we discuss how the traditional role of NGOs as implementers of aid programs is shifting toward a new role as conveners and capability builders.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Despite growing research interest in the social impact of social enterprises (SEs), limited attention has been paid to the antecedents of social impact. To address this gap, we conducted a systematic review of 52 extant studies that examine the antecedents of SEs’ social impact. The paper synthesizes the antecedents identified from prior work and categorizes them into individual- and organizational-level factors. Based on the findings, we develop a future research agenda to advance our knowledge of the antecedents of SEs’ social impact. A key research opportunity is to explore the social impact antecedents related to the institutional and external environment of SEs, an area that has been overlooked in the literature. In terms of practical implications, the study can be used to consider which factors policy makers and practitioners should focus on to develop strategies for improving the social impact of existing and future SEs.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Is charitable giving U-shaped in income? That is, do low- and high-income households donate a higher fraction of their income to charity than the middle class? Decades of correlational studies have found that the share of income given to charity follows a U-shape pattern in the United States, but scholars continue to debate whether the apparent U-shape is a statistical mirage, or accurately characterizes giving across the income distribution. We partnered with a real charity to conduct a charitable-giving experiment where relative endowments are revealed to participants. We experimentally verify that random placement in an income distribution causes a U-shaped giving-income curve. The U-shape observed in real-world data therefore is plausibly not spurious, but a real effect of relative economic status on giving decisions.JEL Classifications: C91, D31, D64, D91, H23

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. The COVID-19 pandemic affected the provision of voluntary work across the globe. We study informal volunteers who buy and deliver groceries for people in a high-risk group or in quarantine. Using data from a volunteering grocery delivering app in Switzerland that coordinated these volunteers, we are able to track volunteering during the pandemic. Combined with public health data on cases and deaths, we test how the severity of the pandemic affects the provision of voluntary work in the form of neighborhood grocery deliveries. We find a positive effect of the number of deaths on voluntary deliveries. However, in contrast to the literature studying the effect of the severity of the pandemic on giving, this effect is concave. We suggest that this concave effect is due to the signal of risk of infection implied by rising death rates, which is at odds with the signal of need to help others.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Conventional thinking holds that for-profits need to innovate for growth to be financially viable. Nevertheless, to date, we have not recognized the importance of nonprofit growth and innovation’s function here. Yet despite “innovation for growth” being an even greater imperative for nonprofits in their quest to resolve societal challenges, prior sector research has, at most, only superficially investigated this construct new to nonprofits. In this first-in-field conceptual project, we weave together a comprehensive literature review with findings from 26 interviews with nonprofit directors. In doing so, we advance the scattered nonprofit-innovation and organization-performance research by describing nonprofit innovation for growth and why it matters. And we originally conceptualize that nonprofit boards seem to prioritize particular factorial determinants new to nonprofit-innovation research in their effective pursuit of innovation for growth.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Moral license researchers find that White people more readily agree with racial discrimination after interacting with nonprofits, but nonprofit organizations often support racial diversity. This study explores whether White nonprofit workers who are prompted to describe their work will identify with the equality espousals of their employers by indicating lower levels of discrimination or indicate higher levels of discrimination as the moral license literature predicts. An online experiment examines how describing nonprofit work influences race and gender opinions, finding that White nonprofit workers indicate lower agreement with a discrimination index after describing their work. These findings imply that racial institutional context is important for moral license and organizational identification. For nonprofits, the finding supports the use of strategic practices to manage diversity even when those practices do not have explicit linkages to race and gender equality.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. The dissolution of nonprofit organizations has been increasingly documented by scholars in recent decades. Within this body of literature, how nonprofits’ community environments affect their dissolution has not been extensively studied. This research combines a range of data sources to conduct a longitudinal analysis (2007–2015) of how two community factors influence the dissolution of nonprofit organizations across U.S. counties: demographic heterogeneity and political ideology. The study finds that counties with higher demographic heterogeneity and more liberal ideology generally experience higher levels of nonprofit dissolution, although these effects vary slightly across nonprofits’ service fields. The findings extend the literature on nonprofit dissolution and offer implications for nonprofits to promote organizational sustainability.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Volunteer work among early adolescents has been largely neglected as a research topic. This study examines the influence parents have on their children’s volunteer activities when they are between 10 and 15, with a special focus on the difference made by parental styles. Data are drawn from a subsample of respondents in the U.K. Household Longitudinal Study. Controlling for parent’s volunteering, social class, and religiosity, sons are encouraged to volunteer by authoritative fathers and discouraged from volunteering by authoritarian fathers. Mothers’ parenting styles have no influence on their children’s volunteering, and permissive parenting by either parent has no influence on volunteering of either boys or girls.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. While results-based performance measurement has become a common practice in governing relationships with external stakeholders, many nonprofits are struggling with severe tensions when implementing results-based management practices inside the organization. This article draws on performance management research in accounting and management to analyze why results-based management poses particular challenges for nonprofits. As its first contribution, the article conceptualizes dedication to values as a particular characteristic of nonprofit organizations that involves high role ambiguity among nonprofit staff. Second, it specifies a particular tension associated with results-based management practices in values-focused work: Results-based management helps to reduce role ambiguity, but by doing so it creates role conflict. Third, the article proposes the interactive use of results-based information as an approach to how organizations with a high dedication to values can increase role clarity for nonprofit staff, while avoiding role conflict.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Even the most conscientious nonprofit organizations can fall victim to fraud. We examine how a nonprofit organization’s Form 990 disclosures and media coverage about an asset diversion influence subsequent donor support. Consistent with a loss in trust, we observe a decrease in donations following a diversion. This decrease is amplified when the diversion is reported in the news. We also find that donations decline more when organizations do not provide transparent disclosures and when losses are higher but only if the diversion receives media coverage. Finally, our results indicate that donors punish organizations less when they report higher recoveries and governance improvements. This study describes mechanisms though which news coverage enhances donor oversight. The media can: (a) directly inform some donors, (b) prompt some donors to obtain further information, and (c) motivate organizations to provide higher-quality disclosure.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This article examines frontline educators as street-level bureaucrats and their pedagogical philosophies, approaches, and choices—what we are calling “street-level pedagogy” to prepare current and future public servants and nonprofit leaders. This provides crucial insight into how (or if) social equity is incorporated into syllabi through a critical reflection on what materials and perspectives are assigned and how they are communicated. Our findings show that gender diversity is more visible, largely through authors of assigned readings, but that visibility is dependent upon presentation method (i.e., citation style). The gender of the professor is linked to gendered patterns in selection of authors of assigned readings. Other types of diversity and intersectionality were visible in course topics and readings, which are discussed along with implications for communicating social equity in graduate nonprofit curricula.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. With the occurrence of high-profile scandals in the nongovernmental organization (NGO) sector, scholars and practitioners alike have questioned why “good” organizations behave badly, yet little empirical research has explored this topic in depth. The present study examines the NGO halo effect, a conceptual framework that proposes three mechanisms to explain how NGO moral goodness can lead to NGO unethical behavior, that is, moral justification, moral superiority, and moral naivety. Through an analysis of 34 interviews with NGO staff and volunteers, we identify 151 unique cases and 17 different types of unethical behavior. We find that 92% of these cases are related to the halo effect, with 22% through moral justification, 25% through moral superiority, and 45% through moral naivety. This study provides empirical support for the NGO halo effect as a factor for understanding NGOs’ unethical behavior, with implications for future research.

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