Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This article provides an analysis of narratives about day-to-day cooperation between volunteers. It shows what challenges there are to cooperation, even when those involved share the same objectives and want to cooperate. Our analysis of the narrative interviews revealed two contrasting ideas volunteers have about cooperation: The first idea likens cooperation to a jigsaw puzzle, with volunteers emphasizing their mutual dependence. The second idea draws a comparison with pieces in a board game, with volunteers asserting their autonomy and acting strategically in dealing with others. The two ideas are shown to be incompatible, leading to volunteers taking rather critical views of each other. This shows the importance of a more nuanced analysis of different ideas of cooperation in volunteer work and of not taking successful cooperation as a given. Our practical conclusion is that the manner of cooperation in volunteer work needs to be negotiated more thoroughly.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This study examines how philanthropic foundations develop innovative approaches to grant-making by collaborating with social entrepreneurs who are embedded in marginalized communities. Traditionally, foundations award grants that meet predetermined strategic objectives that support their theories of change. However, this study explores an alternative approach known as participatory grant-making, in which philanthropic foundations cede control over strategy and finance by adopting an innovative approach that is based more on trust and collaboration. By analyzing in-depth interviews from 16 executives, directors, and social entrepreneurs in the United States, we demonstrate how participatory grant-making constitutes a social innovation that inverts traditional power dynamics in the philanthropic field by enhancing legitimacy, and thereby facilitating a more interconnected, inclusive, and equitable approach to solving social problems. This article demonstrates how the implementation of participatory grant-making programs can help to counter the increasing criticisms levied at traditional approaches to grant-making.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Community-based nonprofits have traditionally emphasized group and developmental cultures which stress the importance of people and transformation. However, evolving institutional environments that champion competing cultures associated with professional and enterprising ideals have increasingly interpenetrated contemporary nonprofits. Drawing on the Competing Values Culture Framework (CVCF), this research explores how organizational members define the complex contemporary landscape of organizational culture in community-based nonprofits and examines the relationship between diverse organizational cultures (e.g., group, developmental, hierarchical, and rational) and perceptions of effectiveness. Results indicate that employees in community-based nonprofits view group cultures as the most characteristic of their organizations, although no organization is characterized by a single culture. In line with the CVCF, we find that each organizational culture is associated with the achievement of different measures of organizational effectiveness in community-based nonprofits. We conclude with a discussion of what this means for research and practice.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Small, grassroots organizations in the Global South play an increasingly prominent role in political advocacy and service provision for displaced populations. Literature on both diasporic organizations and civil society organizations has largely focused on those based in the Global North, however. This article examines the formation of a transnational women’s organization—Mouvement Inamahoro: Femmes et Filles pour la Paix et La Securité—by refugees following Burundi’s 2015 electoral crisis. We focus on the diversity of motivations for individual members in founding and joining it based on 68 interviews conducted in 2019 and 2021. We find that members’ geographical location (Global North vs Global South) played a role in the motivations for membership. Our findings suggest a form of diasporic organization currently untheorized, but one relevant to understanding the influence of displaced groups in local, regional, and international politics.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. High-commitment human resource management (HRM) includes practices, such as autonomy, information, suggestion-making, recognition, equity of rewards, training, and career management. Drawing on notions of horizontal and vertical fit, previous research highlights the relationship between strategic orientation and the adoption of high-commitment HRM. We further examine this relationship in nonprofit organizations (NPOs), given their dual professional and community strategic orientation. Based on a sample of 200 NPOs, our study shows that (a) high-commitment HRM practices form a coherent higher-order construct; (b) professional and community strategic orientations have additional effects on the adoption of high-commitment HRM; (c) the effect of professional strategic orientation on the adoption of high-commitment HRM is partially indirect through community strategic orientation. NPOs often feel the need to reconnect with their core values. High-commitment HRM constitutes an innovative way to unite employees by and for shared values and offers the possibility of reconciling professional and community orientations.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This study aims to understand how job satisfaction relates to constructive and destructive voice in cooperatives by developing an integrated theoretical model that combines Social Exchange Theory (SET) and Motivational Synergy Theory (MST). We investigate the underlying motivational explanation by adopting a follower-centric perspective and focusing on intrinsic and extrinsic factors related to leadership styles and performance-based rewards. The empirical mediation analyses of 300 workers of Italian cooperatives show specific associations of job satisfaction with constructive and destructive voice via transformational and transactional leadership and performance-based rewards. Unlike most existing literature, this study considers employee voice as an extra-role behavior that can be positive (constructive) or negative (destructive) for the organization. Moreover, it brings new theoretical perspectives to the voice debate by combining SET and MST, thus developing fertile grounds for further studies. Finally, it extends existing knowledge about employee voice to the under-investigated but highly relevant context of cooperatives.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Social enterprises address societal problems with conventional business models. While scholars have extensively theorized the trade-offs between social and financial goals, little is known about the factors that affect the co-existence of these dual objectives. We theorize social enterprises’ ability to balance their social and financial performance as a function of their size and experience. We argue that the acuteness of social-financial trade-offs varies across organizations and that social enterprises get better at balancing their dual objectives as they grow larger and older. We study microfinance institutions (MFIs), which are social enterprises that provide financial services to the poor. Using data on 611 MFIs, the empirical analysis confirmed our predictions. We attribute our findings to learning effects and efficiency gains. Overall, in contrast to studies that gloss over heterogeneities among social enterprises, our study shows that the ability of these organizations to balance their dual goals depends on firm-level characteristics.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This study aims to provide empirical evidence supporting the perception of people with disabilities as givers and to explore their giving behaviors. Utilizing data from 2019 Social Survey by Statistics Korea, the study combined resource theory and selective optimization with compensation (SOC) theory to compare monetary donations and volunteer behaviors between people with disabilities and people without disabilities while identifying factors that influence giving behavior among people with disabilities. The study findings revealed that people with disabilities participate in giving behaviors despite resource scarcity, and disability had no significant effect on volunteer hours. Social and cultural resources were significant factors that influenced the amount of donations and hours of volunteering among people with disabilities. In addition, a mutual spillover effect was observed between donation amounts and volunteer hours. Such findings highlight the importance of lowering the barriers and connecting people with disabilities to giving behaviors.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This scoping review takes stock of the landscape of organizational change research in the nonprofit context. Focusing on research published in leading peer-reviewed journals in nonprofit and civil society studies, we extracted 111 published articles from 1973 to 2019. Our findings provide a comprehensive overview of the field capturing how organizations plan for or react to environmental changes in either incremental or comprehensive ways. Findings indicate that most of the research focuses on social service nonprofits with a heavy focus on large-scale comprehensive changes. Based on the identified gaps in the literature, this study discusses implications for future research and implications for practice.

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