Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Despite an increasing number of executives who transition from for-profit to not-for-profit organizations, our understanding of how commercially imprinted managers navigate the new setting remains limited. We collected data in the form of biographical interviews and observations with managers who had previously held a leading position in a commercial company and moved to work for a not-for-profit organization. We offer a typology of three responses that commercially imprinted managers used and identify conditions related to individuals’ biographies that facilitate the use of such responses, including social sector engagement, hybridity in previous job positions, international exposure, volunteering, and a diverse network.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. The movement to democratize data and the advent of virtual research teams provides a near-perfect opportunity for an explosion of comparative nonprofit research. This manuscript provides a useful framework for scholars interested in utilizing comparative nonprofit data. By documenting how the lived context of the data is influenced by governmental, institutional, and social forces, we illustrate how effective comparative data work will involve knowing both the how (data details) and the why (institutional history) of the data elements. We offer three extended examples to illustrate the complexity of comparative data: the definition of nonprofit, the concept of governance, and the definition of financial liability. This approach provides a thoughtful path of not only careful empirical work but also the route to theoretical improvements as well. Furthermore, comparative work also leads the researcher to question assumptions and document the processes which shape the data, even within their singular context.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Philanthropic foundations have assumed prominent roles in revitalizing distressed U.S. cities raising questions about their ongoing effects on governance and policy, institutions, access to decision-making, and outcomes. This exploratory, qualitative study examines foundation interventions in eight cities where foundations account for a substantial share of community and economic development financing. Foundations have significantly altered interventions which, when combined with their substantial giving and government austerity, significantly increases their potential for enduring influence on city governance and policymaking and fosters the growth of nonprofit governance in these cities.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This article examines who volunteers for humanitarian organizations as compared to volunteering for other organizations versus people not volunteering, in the Netherlands. Using high-quality survey data (N = 5,050), we depart from a classic theoretical resource-based approach to study what forms of resources play a role in the likelihood to volunteer for different types of civic associations. We find that education and subjective health as indicators of human capital matter in volunteering for most types of associations, however, more so for humanitarian organizations than some other types of organizations. Social capital is of larger importance in volunteering for leisure organizations than for humanitarian ones, while cultural capital is relevant for volunteering but not more for humanitarian associations. Some forms of capital are thus stronger related to particular organizations, showing the different demographic compositions of the distinguished associations. We recommend to be more sensitive in distinguishing explanations of volunteering for different associations.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This article contributes to research on employee volunteering (EV) by focusing on the experiences of individuals to address the current overemphasis upon collective organizational outcomes. Drawing on qualitative research with employees and corporate social responsibility managers across seven companies, it demonstrates why employees’ experiences are central to understanding the complex mechanisms that link EV with organizational outcomes. The article reveals how both positive and negative organizational outcomes are influenced by the complex relationship between personal motivations and employees’ volunteering experiences—within their organization and within their community—combined with their broader reflexive interpretation of their employing organization and its values.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Although the practitioner and the academic literatures both note the importance of ethno-racial diversity in the nonprofit sector, we pursue a better understanding of this sector’s ethno-racial diversity dynamics by exploring the drivers of ethno-racial diversity at multiple organizational hierarchy levels—boards of directors, executive staff teams, and full-time staff. Using data from nonprofit organizations participating in Candid’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiative, we find evidence that upward mobility for ethno-racial minority group members remains limited. Our findings also indicate a positive relationship between ethno-racial diversity in a nonprofit’s local community and ethno-racial diversity at each organizational hierarchy level. This relationship is partially mediated by the political liberalness of the local community, with the strongest mediating effects at the board of directors and executive staff organizational levels. This partial mediation suggests that the local environment’s tolerance of societal hierarchies and unequal outcomes may be related to nonprofit organizational diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Embedded in growing expectations for post-disaster volunteer participation are questions of volunteers’ psychological well-being. Witnessing destruction and suffering, and the intense pressures of the work itself, can place heavy demands on crisis volunteers, particularly in “informal” community groups that may lack the structure, systems, and supports embedded within “formal” disaster response organizations. This article examines how the Student Volunteer Army in Aotearoa New Zealand has negotiated volunteers’ well-being across two disaster responses: an earthquake in 2011 and terrorist attacks in 2019. We identify three interrelated practices adopted by the group to support well-being: “action” (enabling opportunities for people to engage in volunteering); “reflection” (facilitating processes of discussion and debriefing); and “connection” (creating physical space and practices to enhance social interactions). Our discussion considers the implications of multi-layered practices of support that can develop within informal crisis volunteer groups.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. The literature on nonprofit governance and boards has grown substantially during the past 50 years as researchers from a variety of disciplines and fields have studied governance systems and processes to examine how they are organized, the practices they employ, and their relations with and impacts on nonprofits. This essay offers a domain-based narrative review of the research on the governance of nonprofit organizations and how it has developed over these 50 years. Building on literature reviews and a Delphi study, we summarize the progression of nonprofit governance research, employ a multi-dimensional framework to summarize and assess the state of the field, and offer recommendations for future study. We find the increasingly multinational and multicultural literature of the field has become more rich, nuanced, and increasingly inclusive of contingency, complexity, paradox, and the diverse theoretical perspectives that will enhance our understanding of nonprofit governance.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This article takes a fresh look at nonprofit/government relations in the context of both the partnership literature on collaboration and the closing space literature on repression. Following the Weberian ideal-type approach, we develop a heuristic tool for nuanced analyses of relations between the sectors in comparative research that is applicable in diverse political regime settings. We integrate foundational conceptions of Salamon, Young, and Najam to develop our framework, which we then illustrate with the cases of Russia and China. While repression is not necessarily the predominant characteristic of nonprofit–government relations in authoritarian regime settings, the reduction of intersectoral relations to collaboration strategies common in Western contexts also falls short of capturing the full complexity of the relationship. Rather than trying to establish national patterns, researchers need to remain sensitive to the coexistence of multiple government/nonprofit relationship types, affecting various parts of the nonprofit sector differently.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This study examines a health-focused nonprofit organization’s Twitter chats, using qualitative content analysis and social network analysis (SNA) to describe the characteristics of participants and their patterns of interaction. Together, these analyses indicate that Twitter chats do not produce the dialogue that seems inherent to the format. The chats are driven by a small group of users, feature minimal levels of participation from most users, and are heavy on retweets rather than original messages. Nevertheless, these chats can serve to identify committed users and thereby facilitate future offline relationship building rather than being the primary source of relationship building. Offline interactions hold the potential to result in dialogue consistent with theoretical models; however, these interactions may instead serve organizational purposes within an advocacy context. Suggestions that focus on exploring the value of social media for generating offline engagement and relationship building for further research are made.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. South Korea has experienced a rapid increase in the emergence of social enterprises that aim to address various social problems. However, little is known about the conditions that can affect the emergence of social enterprises at the regional level. This study examined the regional factors that influence the establishment of social enterprises using a panel dataset of observations on 17 metropolitan cities and provinces in South Korea from 2012 to 2019. The appearance of social enterprises in regional entrepreneurial ecosystems was found to be associated with the market, government, networks, financial resources, and human capital. We also found that the determinants of their emergence within South Korea’s social enterprise ecosystem vary based on their level of development and purpose. Based on the results, we suggested several policy implications and suggestions.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. For most nonprofits, their effectiveness, sustainability, and survival all depend on the willingness of individuals to behave in prosocial ways, for example, by giving time, money, and/or resources to various organizations and causes. Scholars have, therefore, long sought to identify predictors of prosocial behaviors; and, one consistently significant variable in this quest has been prosocial role identity. Indeed, the strength of this identity, studies have shown, positively predicts participation in a variety of prosocial activities. Despite this significance, research on service-learning, a widely utilized pedagogical practice intended to prepare prosocially active and engaged citizens, has been largely disconnected from the literature on identity motivated behavior. Yet, this literature provides a strong conceptual foundation for understanding why, when, how, and for whom participation in service-learning will be associated with positive changes in prosocial identities—and, ultimately sustained participation in role-related prosocial behaviors. In this article, we connect these literatures and propose a model.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) becoming business-like is a contested issue. Some understand the adoption of business-like practices by NPOs as a case of adopting rational myths through institutional isomorphism and thus potentially dangerous for NPOs’ ability to fulfill their unique societal roles. Others are more optimistic, arguing that technical rationality is possible in the adoption of business-like practices, and that such practices can therefore support NPOs in fulfilling a wide range of societal roles. Drawing on survey data of NPOs in Flanders, we examine the relationship between the extent to which NPOs use business-like practices, and the extent to which they engage in various societal roles. We find that business-like practices are weakly related to NPOs’ societal roles. All roles are positively related to nonprofit managerialism and unrelated to NPOs’ reliance on commercial funding. Our results suggest that a certain optimism regarding the rational use of business-like approaches is justified.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. While research on organizational aspects designed to enhance volunteer attitudes has grown over time, we still lack knowledge on the mechanisms that explain these relationships and are specific to the volunteering context. In the present study, we draw on social identity theory to explore how two organizational characteristics relating to a nonprofit organization’s (NPO) nature (volunteers’ organizational vision acceptance) and nurture (volunteers’ perception of organizational support) interact to promote volunteers’ engagement and retention. Findings from a survey of 1,355 volunteers in a German environmental NPO show that the relationship between perceived organizational support and both volunteer outcomes is mediated by organizational identification and moderated by volunteers’ acceptance of organizational vision. We contribute to research on the professionalization of volunteer management by highlighting the importance of volunteers’ acceptance of their NPO’s vision for their engagement and intention to leave.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This article examines the influence of pro-social behavior on social entrepreneurial intentions (SEI). Drawing on theory of planned behavior, entrepreneurship, and behavioral psychology literatures, we examine the influence of volunteers’ traits and behavior on SEI. Our research adds two unexplored antecedents to previous studies, volunteers’ altruism, and religion. From a sample of 423 volunteers, our model shows that self-efficacy, perceived social support, opportunity recognition, and altruism, influence volunteers’ SEI, while moral obligation, religion, and empathy were not significant. Thus, without entrepreneurial characteristics such as self-efficacy and opportunity recognition, volunteers are unlikely to engage in social entrepreneurship. Given that altruism can be triggered by contrasting drivers (e.g., self-interest or selflessness), these differences open up a new venue for further studies on volunteers’ traits and SEI. We also suggest that it will be critical to further address the effect of contextual factors on the role of empathy and moral obligation.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Leaders’ perceptions of the effectiveness of their organization’s collaborations are critical as they determine current and future collaboration. This article examines perceived collaboration effectiveness—the extent to which targeted goals are achieved—based on an organization’s role in that collaboration’s governance arrangements (initiation, funding, coordination, and decision-making). Findings suggest that governance arrangements have modest association with perceived effectiveness of collaborations between nonprofits and local governments in Lebanon. Perceived effectiveness increases when an organization is directly engaged in coordinating the collaboration’s work, activities, resources, and partners, but decreases when an organization has the responsibility for decision-making. Perceived effectiveness also appears to be related to trust, relationship effectiveness, service category, and the organization’s sector.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Building on previous literature on corporate behavior, we examine the impact of an nongovernmental organization’s (NGO) foreign status on the moral judgment of its actions in a host country. Individuals in Algeria (N = 450) rated the ethicality of analogous ethical and unethical actions of domestic (Algerian) and foreign NGOs (European). For ethical actions, a foreign NGO was considered less positively than a local NGO for two scenarios out of three. For unethical actions, a foreign NGO was judged more severely in one scenario only. These results suggest that foreign status can influence moral judgment in a way that is consistent with liability-of-foreignness effect predictions. A foreign-sounding denomination can put an NGO at a relative disadvantage compared with its domestic counterpart. Consequently, the denomination choice should be carefully examined.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. The rapid rise of philanthropy in China has motivated extensive research on why people make charitable donations as a personal decision, but few studies have explored the social dimension of these decisions. We propose that the legacy of government welfare provision and the culture of trust have led Chinese citizens to form different expectations for others in philanthropic situations. Our survey results point to some interesting asymmetries: Generalized trust and institutional trust toward local governments inflate people’s expectation for philanthropic contributions from others, whereas particularized trust and trust toward the central government reduce it. Also, Chinese citizens expect government employees to make larger contributions, but they don’t expect charities with government backing to receive correspondingly larger donations. We conclude with some observations on how the unique pattern of social expectation may shape the future of Chinese philanthropy.

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