Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. The contested concept of social entrepreneurship has gained particular prominence in academic literature over the last few decades. To explore how patterns of understandings relating to social entrepreneurship have emerged and shifted over time, we undertook a critical historical review focusing on the most highly cited social…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This article proposes a research program with two goals: (a) to support nonprofit leaders to productively engage evaluation and (b) to advance a meso-level theory of nonprofit evaluation that recognizes the diverse ways nonprofits contribute to social change. Such a research program is timely, as evaluation becomes…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. The study of nonprofit advocacy has evolved significantly over the past two decades, yet gaps still remain in our understanding of the processes and roles of nonprofit organizations in policymaking and policy change. In part, these gaps may be exacerbated by limitations in the methodologies and research…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. In 2017, about 30% of all U.S. adults volunteered for a total of 6.9 billion hours. This raises the question, why do so many people volunteer? Extant research has produced highly variable estimates of the effect sizes of various motivating factors, and there has been little to…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This study analyzes the effect of opportunity costs on the decision to volunteer, the extent of volunteering, and how opportunity costs are related to competing volunteering activities. Our results reveal that opportunity costs operationalized as net wage per hour had the predicted negative effect on the extent…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. By offering low-cost tools of communication and coordination, social media platforms such as Facebook may constitute a substitute for coordination by means of hierarchical organization. Social media may disrupt, appearing as a “weapon of the weak,” a relationship that has traditionally linked membership to resources and influence.…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. High-profile charity scandals have always represented a threat to the nonprofit sector, which relies on public trust and funding to operate. We systematically review 30 years of empirical research on scandals involving nonprofits and present both quantitative and qualitative syntheses of the 71 articles identified. Informed by…