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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The community sector performs an important function in providing emergency food relief, yet food insecurity is often a chronic issue due to poverty and social exclusion. Progressive food provision models present opportunities to improve voluntary food relief services that are dominant in many countries. Informed by research with clients indicating a preference for blended service models that go beyond food provision, two government agencies partnered with a social enterprise and academics to pilot a social supermarket model. This research article (a) briefly summarizes international evidence on social supermarkets' characteristics and offerings, (b) describes a process used to collaboratively develop a social supermarket incorporating universal access and social supports, and (c) presents a rubric defining elements of a social supermarket. Applicable to other community sector settings, the rubric emphasizes dignified access and service, plus opportunities for social support and connection, which are important elements in pathways out of food insecurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his theory about the role of nonprofit enterprise, Henry Hansmann suggested that nonprofit status provides important information to consumers in low-information environments. In this article, we assess whether consumers use nonprofit status to form purchasing preferences as Hansmann predicted. Using choice-based conjoint analysis, we find that under different types of low-information circumstances, study participants prefer goods and services provided by nonprofits to those offered by businesses. In the absence of additional information (such as customer ratings and third-party certifications), nonprofit status serves as an important value signal to consumers. In the presence of additional information, nonprofit status is still relevant in some cases, although it becomes less so. The findings suggest that additional forms of information do not necessarily displace the value to consumers of information about organization type. We reflect on these findings in light of Hansmann's thesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of density dependence emphasize the role of competition and legitimation in organizational life. However, agglomerative configurations and ecological processes vary substantially over space, resulting in heterogeneous sub-populations which organizations select into by choosing locations. Using geostatistical data constructed from form-990 submissions and the American Community Survey, this article studies the role of location and density in the operations of nonprofits using generalized additive models. After controlling for organizational and neighborhood features, the results show substantial variation in the effect of location on total and contributed revenue. Nonprofit density is positively associated with the location effects across a range of distances. The results suggest organizations benefit greatly from locating in high-density regions and may be most sensitive to variation in density in their immediate proximity. The study emphasizes location dependence through the importance of location and the intra-county distribution of nonprofits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nonprofit organizations are influenced by multiple institutional logics. However, data and methodological limitations have restricted scholars to classifying organizations solely according to activity-based logics and hindered investigation of alternative logics. This article presents a method for measuring organizational identity—a critical component of the multiple logics framework. To illustrate our method, we focus on religious identity. Using dictionary-based text analysis, we analyze Form 990 data to identify nonprofit organizations that share the same activity-based logic (e.g., education, arts, and health care) but operate with different identity-based logics (religious vs. secular). To demonstrate the value of measuring organizational identity at scale, we compare religiously identified organizations with their secular counterparts. Results suggest there are approximately 670,000 religious and religiously identified organizations in the nonprofit sector and illustrate the importance of operationalizing multiple institutional logics for nonprofit research. Extensions include creating additional dictionaries and large-scale measures of other organizational identities, including race/ethnicity, gender, LGBTQIA+, and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although COVID-19-related physical distancing has had large economic consequences, the impact on volunteerism is unclear. Using volunteer position postings data from Canada's largest volunteer center (Volunteer Toronto) from February 3, 2020, to January 4, 2021, we evaluated the impact of different levels of physical distancing on average views, total views, and total number of posts. There was about a 50% decrease in the total number of posts that was sustained throughout the pandemic. Although a more restrictive physical distancing policy was generally associated with fewer views, there was an initial increase in views during the first lockdown where total views were elevated for the first 4 months of the pandemic. This was driven by interest in COVID-19-related and remote work postings. This highlights the community of volunteers may be quite flexible in terms of adapting to new ways of volunteering, but substantial challenges remain for the continued operations of many non-profit organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing studies often use the association between sector sizes to test the supplementary and complementary models of government–nonprofit relations, assuming that one mode of government–nonprofit relations dominates a policy subsector. We challenge this assumption and propose that the relationship between nonprofit sector size and the breadth of local government policy actions depends on their level of collaboration. Situated in the context of urban climate governance and drawing information from a national survey of U.S. local government climate actions, we test this modified model and find a statistically significant moderation effect of collaboration. However, contrary to our proposed hypotheses, our findings suggest that a positive association between the number of environmental nonprofits and governmental climate actions exists when the level of government–nonprofit collaboration is low to moderate. We posit that the adversarial lens of government–nonprofit relations and the cost of collaboration are key to understanding these surprising findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The voluntary and civil society sector plays important roles in climate policy, mitigation and adaptation, especially given the pervasive government and market failures in this policy domain. Does the quality and quantity of scholarship published in nonprofit-focused journals reflect the topic's importance? This article reviews voluntary sector scholarship on climate issues and serves to introduce Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 's first organized collection of research on the voluntary sector and climate change. We begin by summarizing and commenting on the findings of a modified systematic literature review of past research on this subject. We then introduce the other five articles published in this symposium, place them in the context of past literature, and discuss their potential contributions to helping researchers expand the conversation and the knowledge on this topic in future work. Finally, we outline ideas and issues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is increasing the likelihood and magnitude of disaster impacts. The nonprofit sector's ability to address disaster survivors' needs will become an increasingly important aspect of adapting to a changing climate. Disaster recovery also provides time for nonprofits to affect community resilience to future disasters and climate change. This article analyzes a unique phenomenon of the sector during disaster recovery: Long-term Recovery Groups. These groups are increasingly encouraged by government and national nonprofits, yet little academic research exists on them. We assess the existence and location of groups, their missions and tasks, and their legal structure. We find heterogeneity in structure and location but similarity in stated goals of addressing failures of government and private sector recovery practices. These groups emerge, as expected, in areas with disaster losses and in areas with slightly greater social vulnerability. Most groups, though, miss the opportunity to include climate change as part of their mission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a summary review of the voluntary sector literature on third sector organizations (TSOs) and climate change. As governments around the world fail to respond adequately to the climate crisis, TSOs are called upon to work with governments, advocate for policy change, and support communities. However, the literature on TSOs and climate change remains limited. We reviewed 68 articles about TSOs and climate change and identified four mechanisms for voluntary action on climate change, which vary on two dimensions—focusing on advocacy or implementation and occurring within or outside government—and include policy advocacy, advocacy for behavior change, participation in governance, and direct interventions. We conclude with five key areas for future research: explaining the relationship between advocacy strategies and context, foregrounding the role of TSOs in climate governance, exploring direct interventions by TSOs, examining community-based TSOs, and linking TSO action and climate outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among policy makers and governments in the Global North, the voluntary sector is considered a central arena for immigrant integration. The aim of this interpretive synthesis was to systematically review research to understand immigrants' volunteering experiences and explore how volunteering may influence immigrants' health. A systematic literature review was performed using six databases. Eleven studies met our inclusion criteria. Meta-ethnography was applied for the interpretive synthesis. Immigrants' perceived volunteering contributed to improving self-conception, engaging in the community, developing skills and knowledge, and building social networks. Under certain conditions, volunteering could be an arena for developing meaningfulness and belongingness and capacity building in the new community for immigrants. Our study indicates that volunteering may have a health-promoting impact that may contribute to immigrants' sense of belonging and positive well-being. However, this effect seems complex, and volunteering activities and contexts must be further explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research note identifies seven key dimensions of the nonprofit sector that nonprofit stakeholders want to monitor to assess the sector's condition, including financial resources; human resources; the diversity of nonprofit boards, staff, and clients; the impact of the nonprofit sector; advocacy activity; ethical and legal behavior; and the existence of a supportive environment. The article then describes current measures of these dimensions, noting the shortcomings of many of these measures. Two government data sources, the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPAs) and the Current Population Survey (CPS), are highlighted that contain timely information about the nonprofit sector but which, to date, have been underutilized by sector stakeholders. Next, the article describes the picture of the nonprofit sector that emerges from the relevant measures before concluding with discussion of further work needed to improve measurement of the sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The governments of the advanced industrial democracies have long provided public policies that redistribute income, and public support for such redistribution has varied across countries and over time. "Who is likely to support these egalitarian policies?" is a perennial question. This article investigates individuals' participation in voluntary sector organizations (VSO) to understand the relationship between VSO participation and support for public policies aimed at reducing inequalities. We use five waves of the World Values Survey across 18 advanced industrial democracies to examine this relationship. Our findings suggest that, in aggregate, the impact of VSO participation negatively influences support for redistribution. This pattern of support changes significantly, however, when we consider the type of VSO, suggesting that VSO participation is not homogeneous. Individuals' support for redistribution is conditioned by where their VSO participation happens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nonprofit sector may suffer financially from inconsistency in regulations and polices surrounding internal control implementation. To address this issue, our study explores how perceived internal control strength differs between nonprofit and for-profit organizations. Furthermore, we examine three components of the Committee of Sponsoring Organization framework to determine which components might significantly influence whistleblowing for nonprofit organizations. As expected, all three components appear to significantly influence whistleblowing for those in for-profit organizations. For those in nonprofit organizations, the perception of control activities and monitoring activities significantly mediates the relationship between organization type and whistleblowing intentions. Finally, the data indicate that the use of an anonymous website for whistleblowing at a nonprofit organization may require added attention and resources if employees at nonprofits are to use this outlet to the same extent as it is used at a for-profit organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of nonprofit studies often assumes that efforts of actors in the nonprofit landscape are beneficial, especially when considering nonprofit human service organizations. However, there are both theoretical and empirical reasons for scholars to adopt a more critical lens when examining these organizations. Taking nonprofit human services organizations as a common setting, the article uses a critical lens to apply classic, "mainstream" theories of the role of heterogeneity in nonprofit sector formation and illuminate risks often neglected in nonprofit human services research. In this way, the article demonstrates that classic social science theories of heterogeneity already offer us the tools we need to critically question dominant assumptions about nonprofit human services provision and challenges the reader to consider why we so rarely use these well-known theoretical frameworks in a critical manner. The article concludes by inviting scholars to utilize additional critical theoretical perspectives in future studies of nonprofit human services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sexual harassment has garnered renewed attention with a wave of allegations against high profile men, including nonprofit executives. Given its legal, organizational, and ethical implications for nonprofit organizations and the sector, it is imperative that nonprofits take steps to prevent sexual harassment. Because there is limited research on sexual harassment in the nonprofit literature, we know little about what nonprofits are doing, or what they should be doing. This research note uses qualitative analysis to explore the anti-harassment practices recommended to nonprofit practitioners and compares these practices to academic research to develop a nonprofit scholarly research agenda. We identify a series of important questions nonprofit scholars could pursue to improve our knowledge of the issue and contribute to both research and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to understand how the scholarship of the nonprofit sector shifted after almost half a century (1972–2019) of publication in the field's premier journal, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. Unlike previous attempts to understand the field's scholarly evolution, we did not rely on expert opinion and analysis of themes but applied an automated content analytic method, more specifically structural topic modeling (STM). Using this method, we identified 37 key thematic topics that most optimally represent the 1,516 articles that were published in the studied period. After reporting these 37 thematic topics, we analyzed fluctuations based on three key periods of the journal and the editors' disciplinary fields. While overall there was a trend of continuity (29 out of 37 topics) and little if any impact of the editors' disciplines, a few thematic topics showed decline and fewer showed increase over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically examines academic scholarship in the field of nonprofit studies that pertains to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people and issues. We introduce the key tenets of queer theory, a critical theory which encourages questioning social constructs, to nonprofit studies as a lens through which to examine the nonprofit sector. Using a queer approach, we analyze the past research on LGBTQ issues along the continuums of whether the research subjects are active or passive participants, and whether the focus on LGBTQ issues is ancillary or central. We find a minority of articles, most written between 2015 and 2019, which position LGBTQ people as central and active participants in the research. We conclude by providing a research agenda for how queer theory can be applied to the nonprofit sector and argue that placing LGBTQ people and organizations as central constituencies in nonprofit research will facilitate social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nonprofits in cities often exist in segregated contexts in which leadership in high-capacity nonprofits reflects the whiteness of surrounding suburbs while leadership in grassroots nonprofits reflects the makeup of residency (low-income people of color). We build upon a small but burgeoning literature that uses critical race theory to better understand whiteness and segregation in the nonprofit sector. Using ethnographic data in Camden, New Jersey (NJ), we identify three key emergent findings on the impact of a segregated nonprofit sector: (a) the sector's segregation reflects regional, residential segregation; (b) White, suburban overrepresentation in high-capacity nonprofits leads to a defense of White, suburban interests; and (c) these dynamics contribute to economic segregation within the sector. In our conclusion, we lay out a wider theoretical discussion of how these factors are interrelated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nonprofit work is oftentimes viewed as inherently meaningful work, but the world of nonprofit work is changing by becoming increasingly marketized. These changes are impacting nonprofit workers' conception and experience of meaningful work. Drawing from scholarship on neoliberal marketization, enterprise culture, and meaningful nonprofit work, this exploratory study examines how an increasingly marketized work environment is influencing nonprofit managers' experience of meaningful work. Findings from interviews demonstrate that nonprofit managers conceive of and experience meaningful work in expected ways (e.g., through serving others). At the same time, findings indicate that their experience of meaningful work evokes elements of enterprise culture. These findings suggest that meaningful nonprofit work is becoming hybridized such that it evokes both prosocial and neoliberal market values. This in turn necessitates a reconsideration of the motivations of nonprofit workers as well as our understanding of the mechanisms by which the nonprofit sector is becoming marketized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing use of donor-advised funds (DAFs) is changing the way many donors give to charity. Despite the increasing influence and importance of DAFs in the nonprofit sector, very little is known about how people actually use them. We conducted 48 in-depth interviews with DAF users, collecting rich qualitative data about why and how donors use DAFs. We use these data to sketch a DAF giving process with four phases and multiple decision points. We highlight some of the common donor strategies that are used with DAFs. Overall, we present evidence of abundant diversity in individual adaptation for giving through DAFs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews a family of multilevel models that can be used to build general theories of the nonprofit sector that are still sensitive to variations in context. The comparative study of the nonprofit (or nongovernmental) sector presents formidable challenges to social scientists who are attempting to advance theory on the sector. Ostensibly, the goal is to model and test theories that are generalizable. Yet, as scholars study topics such as volunteerism, donations, governance, management, advocacy, accountability, and the like in different political, economic, and cultural contexts, they often find different patterns across cases. After reviewing the issues and introducing the idea that time (or more specifically events) can be thought of as context as well, we present an analytical approach for doing comparative research using the framework of hierarchical linear modeling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decoupling theory suggests inconsistencies in what nonprofits do and what they claim to do. Accountability is a potential antidote to such inconsistencies in the nonprofit sector. To test whether different features of accountability prevent decoupling, I examine the divergence in statements about managerialism among nonprofit organizations in a major U.S. metropolitan area. The analysis compares a survey of organizations to public discourse based on five-million-word website text. Professionalism and evaluation indeed prevent organizations from embellishing their discourse. However, inconsistencies between managerial practices and managerial discourse remain frequent: Organizations continue to present symbolic displays of managerialism to the general public, particularly when their missions are tangible. Furthermore, ratings generate inconsistencies by leading organizations to downplay managerial practices. This study develops an institutional understanding of managerial talk and action, shows that the problem of decoupling in the "age of accountability" is multifaceted, and has implications for the estimation of nonprofit practices using automated text analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is an editor's note from the Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Quarterly, honoring the legacy of David Horton Smith, the founder of the journal and the Association for Research on Nonprofits and Voluntary Action. The note acknowledges Smith's contribution to the journal and his efforts in establishing an interdisciplinary, international community focused on research on civil society, philanthropy, voluntary action, and nonprofit organizations. It also highlights Smith's role in ensuring the journal's continued publication and success. The note concludes with gratitude and appreciation for Smith's work. [Extracted from the article]

Historically, bias has been viewed as a problem with qualitative research, in large part because the researcher is often a qualitative study's primary (or, in some cases, only) research "instrument." Even most constructivists who reject traditional notions of scientific objectivity want to produce reasonably accurate reconstructions of their research participants' interpretations of the social world. In fact, presenting accurate reconstructions is one thing constructivists mean when they talk about a study's trustworthiness. Various procedures have been developed to minimize bias and ensure trustworthiness. The Formative Influences Timeline (FIT) is one such procedure. This article provides a brief history of bias in qualitative research, describes the FIT and how to use it, and reviews nonprofit research studies that either employed—or could have employed—the FIT to produce data relatively uncontaminated by researchers' a priori assumptions. The article concludes by acknowledging limitations of the FIT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Benchmarking nonprofit performance can be challenging, constraining the ways nonprofits can use operational data to learn from each other and highlight organizational progress. Valid output or outcome data are scarce, and there is much to learn about measuring performance even when these data are available. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a mathematical linear programming technique that can be used to measure performance in a way that not only produces valid efficiency scores but also allows for benchmarking nonprofits with similar service missions. Using financial and production data from the nonprofit transportation sector, we walk through an example to explore DEA as a tool to measure and benchmark nonprofits. We conclude with suggestions for practice, emphasizing that DEA is useful for stakeholders looking to benchmark nonprofits by underscoring production and performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research developed a machine learning classifier that reliably automates the coding process using the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities as a schema and remapped the U.S. nonprofit sector. I achieved 90% overall accuracy for classifying the nonprofits into nine broad categories and 88% for classifying them into 25 major groups. The intercoder reliabilities between algorithms and human coders measured by kappa statistics are in the "almost perfect" range of.80 to 1.00. The results suggest that a state-of-the-art machine learning algorithm can approximate human coders and substantially improve researchers' productivity. I also reassigned multiple category codes to more than 439,000 nonprofits and discovered a considerable amount of organizational activities that were previously ignored. The classifier is an essential methodological prerequisite for large-N and Big Data analyses, and the remapped U.S. nonprofit sector can serve as an important instrument for asking or reexamining fundamental questions of nonprofit studies. The working directory with all data sets, source codes, and historical versions are available on GitHub (https://github.com/ma-ji/npo_classifier). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent high-profile scandals suggest the potential for a crisis of trust in charities, which could have negative consequences for the nonprofit sector as a whole. Although widespread, this crisis narrative has not yet been subjected to empirical examination. To assess the extent to which public trust has changed over time, we examined trust in nongovernmental organizations within 31 countries over nine consecutive years using data from the Edelman Trust Barometer (N = 294,176). Multilevel analysis revealed that, after allowing for differences in absolute levels of trust and trends across countries, there was actually a small increase in global trust in the nonprofit sector. This increase was sharper among men, people aged below 40 years, and people with higher education, income, and media consumption. Overall, we find no evidence of a crisis of trust in nonprofits; scandals within individual organizations have not affected sectoral trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Facilitating political engagement is a vital function of the nonprofit sector. While some public charities engage in political activities like policy advocacy, many focus exclusively on their core service mission. Current nonprofit research does not adequately theorize the inherent tension between service and advocacy activities. We conceptualize nonprofits engaging in service and advocacy as hybrid organizations that incorporate two distinct logics. Using the organizational hybridity literature, and empirical data from a survey of Massachusetts nonprofits, we examine how the logics of service provision and political advocacy are combined and managed across a sample of nonprofits. We find that nonprofit service–advocacy hybrids adopt an array of organizational structures to accommodate these logics, including decoupled, segregated, outsourced, and blended structures. Our results suggest that compartmentalization may be a common strategy and that certain organizational structures are related to the presence of mission integration, funding reliance, competition, and advocacy objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Volunteers and paid staff frequently work alongside each other in nonprofit organizations. Nevertheless, the possible impact of volunteering on the wages of the paid staff has hardly ever been investigated due to the scarcity of data suited to such research. Based on the matching of two French databases and using several indicators relating to volunteering, this article examines the relationship between volunteering and wages by carrying out investigations that differentiate between employees depending on their position in the socio-occupational hierarchy and the field of activity of their organizations. The results confirm the value of such an approach based on disaggregated data by revealing the diversity of situations. This diversity ranges from some cases where no relationship is observed between volunteering and wages to others where there is a negative relationship and even in a few cases, a positive one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philanthropic foundations are critical actors in the nonprofit sector—funding the programs of social and human service charities, fostering innovation, and serving as patrons of the arts. However, the dramatic growth of foundations and their endowments in recent decades has intensified charges of plutocracy—the claim that foundations are more interested in protecting their power and privilege than in contributing to the public good. The COVID-19 crisis has brought this critique into sharp focus, leading to the question, "How are large foundations acting to stem COVID-19's impact and help in the process of recovery?" Our descriptive study leverages data from a nationwide survey of the 500 largest philanthropic foundations (by total assets) in the United States to characterize foundations' (a) changes to internal strategy or giving, (b) shifts in relationships with grantee organizations, (c) prioritization of communities most affected by the COVID-19 crisis, and (d) collaboration across organizations and sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars and practitioners have argued that effective financial management, particularly the development of operating reserves, can help nonprofits survive economic shocks. The COVID-19 pandemic, which has had a significant impact on the nonprofit sector, provides an opportunity to test whether nonprofits have followed that recommendation, and if so, whether nonprofits with operating reserves were better prepared for the pandemic. Using data from an original survey of more than 600 nonprofit human service and arts organizations, administered when most states had stay-at-home restrictions, we show that most nonprofits experienced an immediate impact on their programs and financing. Yet, those nonprofits with more reserves were less likely to reduce operating hours, lose staff, or experience difficulty acquiring supplies or vendor services. Our study provides rare empirical data on the benefits of operating reserves for nonprofits. Our results also confirm that arts and culture nonprofits were more severely affected than human service nonprofits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent considerable body of research designed to explain variations in nonprofit development among countries tends to gloss over regional disparities that may pose challenges to, or distort, national conclusions. This article therefore takes such analysis down to the regional level in the "hard case" of post–Soviet Russia. What it finds is that, despite its reputation as a uniformly hostile environment for nonprofit organizations, Russia exhibits considerable regional variations in the scale and characteristics of its nonprofit sector. To determine what lies behind these variations, the article then tests four of the most prevalent theories, focusing, respectively, on variations in levels of prosperity, cultural sentiments, popular preferences for collective goods, and underlying power relations among key social actors. The results not only shed important light on the factors responsible for regional variations in Russia's nonprofit development, but also demonstrate the general importance of bringing the subnational level into analyses of nonprofit development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The public and nonprofit sectors generally pay less than the private sector, and individuals are willing to forgo higher salaries in exchange for greater intrinsic satisfaction derived from making a contribution to society. However, personal financial considerations, such as education debt, may discourage individuals from pursuing careers in lower paying sectors even if they are predisposed to public service motivation (PSM). We surveyed a sample of graduating students to investigate if (a) education debt discourages students from pursuing lower paying public or nonprofit careers and (b) whether PSM overrides the considerations students might make about entering lower paying sectors as their education debt rises. First, we find that education debt has a marginal effect on initially selecting private over public and nonprofit careers. Rising education debt may discourage students from public sector careers after controlling for PSM. We also find that rising education debt may discourage students from nonprofit careers even with high levels of PSM. The present study enhances our understanding of how financial considerations, in the form of education debt, may influence a student's initial choice in pursuing public, private, and nonprofit careers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among antipoverty nonprofit organizations (NPOs), a significant shift back to "relational work" has been occurring. This form of human services connotes strong bonds and durable engagement with clients on major life changes. Critics have associated such efforts with paternalistic and disciplinary regimes reinforcing broader neoliberal trends. Perhaps now, with mounting pressures toward (narrow) professionalization among nonprofits, these illuminating critiques can usefully be paired with investigations doing justice to relational work's beneficial inner workings and effects. Informed by years of immersion in NPOs and insights from "late" Foucault—ironically the central theoretical influence among critics of relational work—we show how and why researchers might approach even problematic aspects of this form of social action as unavoidable elements capable of contributing to the alleviation of poverty. The conclusion argues for pragmatic and multifaceted approaches to the study and management of antipoverty nonprofits balancing both the precariousness and promise of relational work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Volunteers are mission-critical resources, and the ongoing ability of many nonprofit organizations to serve their constituencies is dependent on such contributed services. Utilizing an online questionnaire administered to coordinators of volunteers, the study investigates perceptions and practices in the Australian nonprofit sector in the reporting of volunteer contributions of services. We find (N = 166) that although organizations place high value on volunteer contributions, the benefits and impact are rarely reported. The majority of respondents consider that a statement of volunteer contributions should be included alongside financial statements to give a more complete representation of organizational performance. This would enhance the accountability and legitimacy of the organization. No regulatory requirement to report and a lack of resources are cited as the predominate reasons for current nondisclosure. The findings support the need for a best practice model for recording and reporting volunteer contributions to recognize the significance of the resource. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using Care Store as a case study, this research examines the innovative development and value penetrations of workers' co-operative societies in Hong Kong. Care Store operates through the practices of equality and mutual care, in the unfriendly neoliberalist social order of Hong Kong. The society penetrates the dominant models of labor organization and consumption process. But the penetration of structural inequalities is limited, because the female workers of the society remain low-income laborers, social boundary and exclusion still take place, and the workers internalize their cultural inferiority. In comparison with innovative organizations in other regions, workers' co-operative societies in Hong Kong have little opportunity to rely on or collaborate with the public and private sectors, and they explore a more progressive path of penetration in development. Practices strengthening this path can not only sustain these young organizations but also enrich the understanding of the true potentials of the nonprofit sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines whether the agency cost component referred to as "residual loss" differs between nonprofit and shareholder-owned microfinance organizations and whether such costs are further influenced by CEO power. We use operating expenses, asset utilization, liquidity, and tangible asset intensity to proxy for residual loss. Using 374 microfinance organizations located in 76 countries, we find evidence that the residual loss is higher in microfinance organizations incorporated as nonprofits, but only if the CEO is powerful. Our empirical evidence illustrates the importance of installing proper governance mechanisms to minimize costs caused by high managerial power in the nonprofit sector. When CEOs are not powerful, nonprofits appear to have lower residual loss than for-profit organizations do, consistent with a motivated agent perspective. An important message of our study is that traditional agency theory perspectives might be ill-suited to analyze residual loss as a function of the nonprofit versus for-profit organizational form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This analysis tests fundamental nonprofit theory using individual-level demand-side data, which complements existing studies that have relied on organizational- and community-level variables alone. We use survey and administrative data to test the relationship between individuals' perceptions and use of local government services and their reported use of nonprofit services, controlling for the density of organizations around respondents' addresses. Individuals who report being better served by government services are significantly more likely to report using nonprofit services—while individuals who report being unserved by government are also less likely to report access to nonprofits, despite the actual density of organizations around them. These findings support theories of interdependence between government and nonprofit sectors. However, income-based disparities in perceived access to nonprofit services highlight persistent gaps in serving all individuals on the local level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the relevance of suggestive findings and assumptions about immigrant philanthropy to a diaspora from a high-income country of origin, whose members are generally highly educated and professionally employed: the Lithuanian diaspora. We investigate whether this immigrant group's voluntary sector participation, despite these differences, may evolve similar to that of other immigrant groups studied. The study casts doubt on the generalizability of the current claims from the literature—which is largely derived from cases of immigrants migrating from the South to the North—to immigrant and diaspora groups who are highly skilled and originating from relatively more industrialized countries (North–North migration). The findings highlight the need to examine the voluntary sector participation of a greater variety of diasporas and to recognize that not all groups will behave similarly. Some of the differentiated behavior may stem from demographic characteristics specific to North–North migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are You Ready: Financial Management, Operating Reserves, and the Immediate Impact of COVID-19 on Nonprofits. I Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 49 i (6), 1191-1209. https://doi.org/10.1177/0899764020964584 Table 1 of this article has been updated to reflect the correct values in "Arts and culture" and "Human services" rows. [Extracted from the article]

"Jesus Speaks Better": Interactions Between State and Faith-Based Organizations in Service Implementation. I Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 0 i (0). https://doi.org/10.1177/08997640231165525 In this article, some of the funding details were omitted in the initial OnlineFirst version. The article has been updated with following funding information: "The research was supported by São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) Grants: 2020/13977-6, 2019/13439-7 and 2019/204495-5". [Extracted from the article]

We extend both the U.S. and European nonprofit auditor choice literature by examining the determinants as well as consequences of local industry specialist auditor choice within the nonprofit sector. In our determinants models, we find that local industry specialist auditors are associated with higher governance quality, poorer financial health, and greater complexity. In our consequences models, we find robust evidence that nonprofits audited by non-Big 4 local industry specialist auditors have shorter audit report lag and see more future direct donations than nonprofits audited by nonspecialist auditors and Big 4 auditors. Additional findings and implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interestingly, although many authors consent that nonprofit organizations and the nonprofit sector have grown in many countries, there is little discussion of how to best measure this growth. Looking at the broad universe of nonprofit organizations, there is no single measure that is relevant for the whole sector and captures changes adequately. This article gives an overview of commonly-used growth measures in the existing nonprofit literature and discusses the informative value of the various measures. Using Austrian and Scottish time-series data, we present an empirical example of how the growth story of the nonprofit sector can change depending on the measures used. The correlations between measures such as the number of organizations, income/expenditures, and assets are particularly small. We recommend that researchers measuring the growth of the nonprofit sector should be clear about the properties of their selected measure, and where possible should present alternative measures in their analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the reasons the I NVSQ i umbrella is strong is because of our people, the community of I NVSQ i . During our first term, we experimented with an Associate Editor structure, and welcomed Rebecca Nesbitt and Sara Konrath (US) as I NVSQ i 's first Area Editors. We also highlight the work of our Research-to-Practice Editor, Tracey Coule (UK), whose work engages I NVSQ i authors with practice and policy communities and vice versa. [Extracted from the article]