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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.

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.

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.

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.

Nonprofits compete with collaborators and collaborate with competitors regularly. Collaboration, a long-standing normatively preferred strategy for nonprofits, is utilized as modus operandi without thought to the potential unintended consequences. While competition is a dirty word for nonprofits, it is a necessary but undesirable reality and should not be avoided without consideration to the potential benefits. Nonprofit leaders may not be willing to explicitly acknowledge the use of competition as an operational strategy, which makes room for cognitive dissonance to impact the study of nonprofits. This piece identifies impacts of cognitive dissonance offering direction for future research exploring the interactive nature of competing with collaborators.

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.

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.

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.

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 ).

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.

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.

Nonprofit organizations often work on the front lines of disaster assistance and emergency relief. In this sweeping coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, the nonprofit sector in many countries is playing an active role in the national fight against the coronavirus. However, the Chinese nonprofit sector only plays a marginal role in the battle. This article, from a government–nonprofit relationship perspective, delves into the underlying factors shaping the Chinese nonprofit sector’s limited involvement in this pandemic crisis and the impacts of the crisis on the Chinese nonprofit sector. In particular, we argue that a strong and centralized political regime leaves little room for nonprofits’ involvement in emergency relief, resulting in a nonprofit sector that is vulnerable and marginalized. Nonprofits have to be smarter in coping with the government in the COVID-19 downturn.

In this article, an actor-centered approach was used to conceptualize marketization trends under statist-corporatist regimes and to critically examine theories on the trends and impact of marketization. A grounded theory method was used to guide data collection. A total of 65 critical incidents from the perspective of senior executives were collected from 18 nonprofit organizations in Hong Kong. Their annual budgets all exceeded US$6.5 million. Behavioral event interviews were conducted with the senior executives to understand how they conceptualized the organizational challenges and rationalized their decisions. The results show that commercialization was not a major marketization trend in statist-corporatist regimes. Nonprofit organizations were found enhancing self-governance capacities through building management competencies, articulating organizational policies and know-how, and adopting strategic management. It was not driven by institutional isomorphism. Second, strategic human resource management was revealed as another strategy to reduce resource dependence, which enriches the theory's current focus on earned-income strategies. Third, service expansions were observed as either directed at service gaps or driven by competition. By specifying the rationales for service expansion in exclusively nonprofit service markets, the study nuances the debate over the impact of marketization on nonprofit sectors. Points for practitioners For policymakers, it is important to be aware of the impact of market mechanisms on the nonprofit sector, which varies across countries due to the differences in the institutional framework for social service provision. For nonprofit managers, particularly those working in a statist-corporatist sector, they may benefit from self-governance strategies, revenue strategies such as active fundraising campaigns and regular donor programs, and strategic human resource management practices. More importantly, it is revealed that service expansions driven by competition for market shares and resources could render nonprofits, particularly those serve multiple types of target beneficiaries susceptible to the struggles of defining organizational identity and core competencies.

This article studies the intersection between the largest U.S. industry—health care—and the $1 trillion nonprofit sector. Using analytical and empirical analyses, the authors reveal the marketing strategies helping private nonprofit hospitals achieve higher output, prices, and profits than for-profit hospitals. Nonprofit hospitals, focusing on both profits and output, obtain these outcomes by expanding their service mix with high-priced premium specialty medical services (PSMS), whereas for-profit hospitals can be more profitable with higher prices for basic services. Competition increases the differences between nonprofit and for-profit hospitals in PSMS breadth, output, and prices. Nonprofit hospitals lose their competitive advantage when competing with other nonprofits; that is, presence of a for-profit competitor broadens available nonprofit PSMS. With broader service mixes, nonprofits focus more on national advertising than for-profits because PSMS (e.g., pediatric trauma, neurosurgery, heart transplants, oncology) require larger geographic markets than local basic services (e.g., laboratory, diagnostics, nursing, pharmaceutics). Exogenous, heterogeneous state regulations restricting for-profit hospital entry help econometric identification (i.e., markets prohibiting for-profits act as controls). Service mix may be a key difference between nonprofit and for-profit hospitals.

Millennials are a substantial segment of the workforce; they are perceived to be driven by higher pay, quick to be dissatisfied and leave a job, and committed to volunteering. This article examines how these perceptions translate to job mobility in terms of job switching within and across sectors, without drawing cross-generation comparisons. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 cohort (NLSY97) from 2008 to 2013, we notice a trend among millennials of frequent job switching within rather than across sectors. Job dissatisfaction is the strongest predictor of public-sector employees switching jobs within the sector. For sector switching, we find some variation: Low pay corresponds with exiting the nonprofit sector, whereas job dissatisfaction is the strongest predictor of leaving the public sector. Millennials working in the public and nonprofit sectors are less likely to switch sectors if they volunteer. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

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.

Elder care is one of the sectors where nonprofit organizations are most active. One exception is the Scandinavian countries, where the nonprofit sector plays a marginal role in this area. In the article, we ask why this is the case. The findings show that in Sweden, nonprofit organizations have found it hard to compete with for-profits and that this inability to compete, in turn, reflects their relative organizational weakness. A main argument in the article is that this weakness must be understood in the context of the historical development of the modern elder care system in Sweden, where social democratic reformers in the 1940s chose to create a universal public system for providing services to the elderly, thereby making the nonprofit sector redundant. Universalism in this interpretation was seen as incompatible with service delivery by private organizations, a view that has come to change in recent years.

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.

The rise of professionalism within the nonprofit sector has transformed the sector’s reliance on well-meaning volunteers to paid professionals. While the professionalization of the nonprofit workforce is likely to continue, nonprofits are increasingly challenged for their inability to pay competitive wages. Our study argues that a social expectation for nonprofit employees to forgo some of their wages influences the donative labor narrative, which in turn impacts low nonprofit wages. We present data from an online survey experiment of executive directors at 467 nonprofits, along with their organizations’ Form 990 filings, to contrast socially biased attitudes and genuine views toward the donative labor hypothesis. The findings illustrate that the donative labor narrative should be understood as a result of social expectations for sacrifice of nonprofit employees, rather than a simple outcome of supply and demand in the labor market. We discuss the need to reframe the widespread donative labor narrative.

To what extent do leaders of nonprofit organizations run for elected office? We address this question through an exploratory study using survey data from a random sample of 184 leaders of nonprofit human service organizations in the United States. Drawing upon theories of political ambition, we explore the factors that may shape nascent political ambition (propensity to run) as well as expressive political ambition (running for office). We find that nonprofit leaders are no more likely to run for office than the average citizen, but interest in running is much more common. We identify several individual-level and professional socialization factors associated with political ambition. Our study makes an important theoretical contribution by outlining a model of political ambition for the nonprofit sector that can be tested in future studies, and makes an important practical contribution by highlighting ways that associations and nonprofit industry groups might convert nascent ambition into expressive ambition.

Pending leadership transitions in the nonprofit sector present a timely need to understand the career path to the executive position, but very few studies on nonprofit career paths have been conducted. A systematic study would help make sense of the existing leadership pipeline to the executive office and offer promising insights that contribute to theory building in the sector. This study investigates the career paths of a national random sample of nonprofit executives serving health and human service nonprofit organizations. Primary and secondary data were collected and analyzed on the experience, education, and credentials these executives hold. The analysis evaluates variations among career characteristics, as well as applies career typologies from within and beyond the nonprofit sector. Respondents also provided qualitative descriptions of their path to executive office, which are insightful about influencing factors that are beyond a resume’s depiction of credentials. The findings are rich in descriptive value and are discussed in light of their utility for nonprofit boards charged with executive selection responsibilities. Finally, the findings are also applied to formulate propositions for future research about how individual career movement may be shaping the nonprofit sector.

This study hypothesizes that a country with a high level of democracy should experience more extensive growth in its nonprofit sector than authoritarian or less democratic countries, controlling for the relevant social and economic variables. We tested this hypothesis using cross-national longitudinal data. The results indicate that a democratic political system affects positively on the emergence and growth of the nonprofit sector across sample countries. However, the relationship appears to be non-linear, although nonprofit activities are sustained at a certain level. We also found different developmental trajectories among the nonprofit sectors that depended on how different countries operated their democratic political systems.

There are profound differences within the nonprofit sector, and research benefits from the ability to group nonprofits by substantive focus. Researchers typically rely on the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities (NTEE) codes to categorize nonprofits, but we argue that mission statement text offers a better information source for nonprofit researchers to create categories of organizations. Harnessing advances in data availability and machine-reading technology, this article introduces a new method whereby mission statement analysis drives research and analysis of “like” organizations. Using an automated dictionary method to analyze mission statements, we draw a sample of housing and shelter nonprofits in Washington State. Compared with the corresponding sample based on NTEE classification, our results find roughly double the number of housing and shelter nonprofits based on their mission statements. Our method also proves more accurate than NTEE codes when applied to a sub-sample of nonprofits known to provide shelter for the homeless.

This research makes two main contributions: (a) validates Themudo’s findings of a positive correlation between women’s empowerment and the development of the nonprofit sector by using different forms of empowerment and (b) suggests women’s empowerment causes nonprofit development, thus contributing to the formation of a gender theory. Using women’s economic empowerment by county ( n = 3,428) and women’s state-level political empowerment ( n = 50), the positive correlation between women’s empowerment, both economic and political, and nonprofit development is confirmed. Next, Granger causality tests (1975-2013, n = 39) suggest women’s political empowerment causes nonprofit development. These results provide insights for further research in nonprofit development and suggest that policies that increase women’s empowerment will also benefit the nonprofit sector.

Innovation and internal communication are essential for any successful organization. Although communication within organizations has long been studied in the for-profit sector, we still know little about the impact of communication types on innovation in the public and nonprofit sectors. To examine this question, we leverage and construct a longitudinal dataset using 5 years of the Korean Workplace Panel Survey (KWPS) from 2005 to 2013. Employing media richness theory, this study finds that internal communication positively influences innovation in the for-profit sector, which is a finding consistent with prior studies. Similarly, in the nonprofit sector, we find that meeting with the executive director and the number of communication channels utilized in an organization has a positive impact on innovation. However, we do not find that these communications have any impact in the public sector.

Although emotion and leadership is a flourishing topic in organizational research, little is known about the actual emotion-related leader behaviors within the context of nonprofit organizations. Through an inductive, multiple-case study drawing from 34 semistructured interviews with individuals who have occupied leader and/or follower roles in nonprofits organizations, a meso-level framework emerges that delineates the mutually strengthening interplay of emotion-related leader behaviors and organizational display norms in the nonprofit sector. These norms favor the expression of positive emotion and proscribe the display of negative emotion. Nonprofit leaders who enact emotion-related behaviors congruent with these display norms generate the follower outcomes of engagement and loyalty. Implications for nonprofit leadership research and practice are discussed.

Organizations should prepare for crises, through identifying crisis concerns, having written crisis communication plans, and designating teams for crisis planning and response, for example. Nonprofit organizations, which represent an important sector of U.S. society, are no different in needing to prepare, but to date, a review of their crisis communication preparedness is lacking. Therefore, a national online survey of 2,005 U.S. charitable organizations was administered to determine nonprofit organizations’ adoption of an anticipatory perspective of crisis management. The anticipatory perspective shifts the organization’s focus from reaction to crises to anticipation of them. According to the survey, 75% of organizations reported at least one organizational crisis in the 24 months prior to taking the survey (circa 2017–2019). Loss of a major stakeholder was the most common organizational crisis that had occurred and the greatest future concern. Most nonprofits (97.5%) reported implementing some crisis communication preparedness tactics. Importantly, charitable organizations can enact communication preparedness tactics without significantly detracting from program delivery. Moreover, given the general concerns within the sector, nonprofit organizations should prepare specifically for loss of a major stakeholder and technologically created crises such as data breaches and negative word of mouth on social media.

The remarkable feature of the nonprofit sector is its astonishing diversity. This feature gets short shrift in the traditional market or governmental failure theories of the nonprofit sector. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann’s concept of functional differentiation, we demonstrate that these theories are implicitly economy- and politics-biased. In seeking to overcome these biases, we show that nonprofits and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are better understood as those varieties of organizations whose primary focus is on function systems other than the economy and politics. We summarize this argument in the concept of organizational multifunctionality, which turns out to be likewise applicable to the for-profit sector.

The “public support test” is a set of provisions in the Internal Revenue Code determinative of public charity status for 85% of public charities (excluding houses of worship), requiring that at least one third of these nonprofits’ revenue come from the public broadly, government sources, or nonprofit funding intermediaries. Despite its importance in defining much of the nonprofit sector’s boundaries, no previous research describes the extent and sources of charities’ public support or how these vary by nonprofit subsector, size, and age. This article fills this knowledge gap based on analysis of 501(c)(3) public charities’ Form 990 and Form 990EZ data, finding most publicly supported charities greatly exceed the minimum public support requirements, but with wider variation in directness and breadth than “public support” might connote.

Two competing theories argue that the nonprofit sector pays differently: Nonprofit employees may accept lower pay to be able to do meaningful work for a good cause, or they may earn higher pay due ...

This study discusses and documents the role and diversity of fiscal sponsors within the nonprofit sector. Fiscal sponsors provide critical support to nascent nonprofits, yet relatively little is known about which nonprofits elect to become fiscal sponsors, which type of projects and/or organizations do they choose to sponsor, and what costs are associated with sponsorship. We find that Arts and Philanthropic/Grantmaking subsectors are the most frequent home for fiscal sponsors; however, most subsectors house fiscal sponsors. Interestingly, with rare exception, fiscal sponsors charge a non-trivial fee based on revenues raised by the sponsored organization in exchange for administrative support services. The administrative support services provided cluster around financial management (bookkeeping, tax, bill paying). Overall, this study sheds light on an important support function for nascent nonprofits. The study concludes with future research streams that can further our collective understanding of a growing and critical support function for early stage nonprofits.

Nonprofit sector organizations tackle intractable problems by seeking support from external funding agencies, resulting in funders holding power through resource control. Nonprofits also access resources and coordinate activities through building networks with other nonprofits. Such networks have been viewed as emergent with an underlying assumption that the nonprofits determine when and with whom to partner. Given the power of funders, however, how much control do the nonprofits have in determining whether or not to partner? Document analysis of 83 application packets used by funders in the United States to collect and assess nonprofit suitability for funding shows significant differences between private- and public-sector control over nonprofits decisions to network. Unlike private-sector foundations, public-agency funding documents mandate awardees to network, which has practical and theoretical implications. Although the idea of building a network implies autonomous acts on the part of nonprofits, some are prone to hierarchical influences through grant-making policy.

This article reviews the Federal Assistance Award Data System (FAADS), a comprehensive online archive of federal grant activity. Relatively few nonprofit scholars have used this extensive data source due to significant structural limitations in the data. This article aims to describe and mitigate those limitations while stimulating new research on government awards to nonprofits. The article profiles the process of federal award flows and reporting. We also identify the primary advantages and shortcomings in the current data structure. Finally, we post an electronic matching algorithm that links individual federal award records to recipient Form 990 financial data. This process allows researchers to analyze the influence of federal awards with greater fidelity than has been previously accomplished in the literature.

The evolution of activity within the nonprofit sector (and nonprofit-type activity without the sector) has outpaced the ability of nonprofit theory to describe it. In contrast to legalistic, sector-based theories of the nonprofit, this article proposes an institutional theory of the nonprofit that defines its distinction from public and private institutions through (a) the voluntary (rather than coercive) assignment of roles and (b) the use of the good or service by non-payers. The voluntary and redistributive nature of such nonprofit-type institutions makes them primarily compatible with the distribution of goods that are non-subtractable and excludable (toll goods).

Although scholars and practitioners in the field of public administration have investigated the nature of social enterprises emerging from the nonprofit sector, little research has been undertaken on the role of governments in facilitating prospective social enterprises to transform nonprofits into social enterprises. This research explores the global phenomenon of social entrepreneurship by analysing the government-driven social enterprise programs in South Korea. What is the government-driven social enterprise policy in South Korea? What is the role of the government in driving the success of the social enterprises in South Korea? What are the factors that affect the success of government-driven social enterprises? The results of this study highlight how government support helps nonprofit organizations cope effectively with diverse constraints that may cause nonprofit failure in societies like South Korea. The study findings confirm that Salamon's third-party government perspective and nonprofit failure theory justify government intervention, suggesting that governments may drive nonprofit organizations efficiently to overcome a propensity to failure by providing them with resources. Points for practitioners This study found that government support to the small nonprofit organizations may facilitate civil society growth in Eastern Asia countries. Our research of government-driven social enterprise policy in Seoul Korea will provide a policy model for policy decision-makers for program design that would expand social services provided by non-state actors, and government-driven nonprofit policies will allow public agencies to direct and expand the social services without creating new agencies. However, we also found that the mandatory administrative approach may not address nonprofits’ daily challenges in an effective manner.

This article revisits government failure theory by examining the relationship between government decentralization and the size of the nonprofit sector (NPS). Government failure theory posits that nonprofits are most active in regions where the largest gap exists between the homogeneous supply of public service and heterogeneous citizen demands. Following this theory, government decentralization should decrease the size of the NPS, as it increases the efficiency and heterogeneity of government services. This article tests this hypothesis using a sample of U.S. counties. Decentralization is measured in two dimensions: vertical decentralization and horizontal fragmentation. After using instrumental regressions to eliminate the endogeneity bias, we find that counties with a more horizontally fragmented governmental system are associated with a larger NPS. Vertical centralization leads to a denser NPS but has no impact on the NPS revenue or assets. The impacts of resident heterogeneity are also mixed. As such, government failure theory is only partially supported, at best. Contrarily, interdependence theory is supported by this study.

Using a sample of industry-diverse nonprofit organizations, we find support for stakeholders’ use of nonprofit going-concern audit opinion (GCO) reports. We study the reactions of the three largest nonprofit stakeholder groups: donors, service recipients, and managers. Our findings suggest that although large (sophisticated) donors respond negatively to a GCO, small (unsophisticated) donors contribute more following a GCO. We also find that service recipients spend more at service-oriented organizations than at charitable nonprofits following a GCO. Finally, managers respond to a GCO by increasing organizational efficiency at service-oriented organizations. Taken together, the evidence suggests that GCOs are informative in the nonprofit sector, and stakeholders’ responses to GCOs depend on stakeholder and organization type.

Amid recent attention to alternative and hidden organizations, empirical studies have thus far tended to focus on large, well-known organizations in contrast to lesser known, local, and partially hidden organizations. Organizations that hide face several advantages and disadvantages, and this article seeks to examine how one nonprofit organization manages the benefits and obstacles of being partially hidden. Using ethnographic field methods and semi-structured interviews, we analyze how one homeless shelter’s visibility fluctuates in relation to its goals. We argue that by operating as a shadowed or shaded organization, this shelter is resisting trends toward organizational transparency that are especially powerful in the nonprofit sector. The findings highlight how the organization manages tensions of (in)visibility to maintain autonomy, while still securing support from external organizations. The results have implications not only for studying hidden organizations, but also for alternative and nonprofit theorizing.

This article explores the dynamics of diversity and inclusion in the context of boards of directors in the nonprofit sector. Our multimethod study builds on current diversity research by exploring social microprocesses of inclusion in diverse governing groups. We consider functional and social approaches to inclusion within boards, and address the potential for more transformative inclusion. Our findings suggest significant opportunities for meaningful change by shifting focus from diversity to inclusive practices within diverse groups.

The present paper introduces and compares two alternative perspectives on hybridity. One is the perspective of hybrids being located at the interface of dominant ‘sectors’ such as the private for-profit sector, the public sector and the civil society or nonprofit sector. The alternative perspective focuses on a combination of sector-specific governance mechanisms. The paper discusses the characteristics as well as the advantages and disadvantages of those two perspectives and what a combination of both implies for further research with an emphasis on the analysis of organizational pathologies and managerial coping.

The importance of tax-exempt borrowing as a capital source to the nonprofit sector has significantly grown over time. Outstanding tax-exempt bonds issued by nonprofits have risen from an inflation-adjusted US$106.3 billion in 1993 to US$388.5 billion in 2010 representing an 8% compound annual growth rate over the period. The increased importance of tax-exempt borrowing relative to other borrowing for nonprofits has gone unnoticed. Here, we ask what factors are associated with this trend. We find wide variation in the increasing use of tax-exempt bond usage between nonprofit sectors. Although nonprofit borrowers other than hospitals have increasingly entered the tax-exempt capital market over the past decade, they still tend to be large organizations with lower risk of bankruptcy or default. Our empirical findings continue to raise the questions that others have raised: How do we make smaller, capital-starved nonprofits better able to take advantage of the tax-exempt market in a responsible manner?

Calls for accountability in the nonprofit sector have never been stronger, and the rise of various forms of self-regulation represents a profound shift for nonprofits. Existing studies tend to focus on effective design and implementation of accountability policies, with an eye toward improving nonprofit efficiency and reducing instances of misconduct. Against this backdrop, we draw on sociological institutionalism to theorize an alternative view of one form of self-regulation, formal codes of conduct or ethical codes. In this view, formal policies, such as codes, are assumed to be adopted as a response to pressures in an organization’s institutional environment, beyond their purported instrumental value. Using a quantitative analysis of code adoption by 24 of 45 state nonprofit associations over the period 1994 to 2011, we provide evidence that codes arise due to general environmental conditions, particularly related to the influences of neoliberalism and professionalization, net of the functional demands of any particular context.

Scholars have suggested myriad characterizations of the relationship between organizations of the nonprofit sector and government. We expand upon Young’s “slight twist” of the economic supplementary view of government/nonprofit partnership to develop a model to explain the variation in levels of funding by local educational foundations (LEFs) in New Jersey public school districts. Seeking to better understand this private financing of public education, we empirically test for correlates of these funding variations using Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Form 990 data. Although we could not empirically verify an inverse relationship between state aid to education and level of LEF granting, we did find some evidence of a direct relationship between such private financing and median household income. Our analysis supports a more historically nuanced explanation of the role of LEFs in New Jersey public education.

Many critical studies have warned that government–nonprofit partnership in welfare provision can lead to the marketisation of the nonprofit sector. However, this article contends that the adoption of market-like approaches does not necessarily result in the complete marketisation of the sector. Through a case study of Korean nonprofits engaged in a workfare scheme, this article reveals how nonprofits manage to safeguard their reciprocal culture and solidarity by strategically appropriating the methods of the capitalist market. By outlining these street-level activities, this study aims to underline the persistence of cooperative traditions in the nonprofit sector even within a competition-driven policy environment.

Performance measurement has gained increased importance in the nonprofit sector, and contemporary literature is populated with numerous performance measurement frameworks. In this article, we seek to accomplish two goals. First, we review contemporary models of nonprofit performance measurement to develop an integrated framework in order to identify directions for advancing the study of performance measurement. Our analysis of this literature illuminates seven focal perspectives on nonprofit performance, each associated with a different tradition in performance measurement. Second, we demonstrate the utility of this integrated framework for advancing theory and scholarship by leveraging these seven perspectives to develop testable propositions aimed at explaining variation across nonprofits in the adoption of different measurement approaches. By better understanding how performance measurement is conceptualized within sector, the field will be better positioned to both critique and expand upon normative approaches advanced in the literature as well as advance theory for predicting performance measurement decisions.

The nonprofit starvation cycle is a debilitating trend of under-investment in organizational infrastructure that is fed by potentially misleading financial reporting and donor expectations of increasingly low overhead expenses. Since its original reporting in 2004, the phenomenon has been referenced several times, but seldom explored empirically. This study uses 25 years of nonprofit data to examine the existence, duration, and mechanics behind the nonprofit starvation cycle. Our results show a definite downward trend in reported overhead costs, reflecting a deep cut in administrative expenses partially offset by an increase in fundraising expenses. The organization’s size is instrumental to its behavior, with a sharp rise in reported overhead occurring when revenues equal $100,000, but diminishing at $550,000. Finally, the brunt of the cuts have fallen on nonexecutive staff wages and professional fees, which heightens the concern of potentially ill effects derived from a fixation on overhead cost reduction.

Although scholars of the nonprofit sector have looked at the theoretical implications of social enterprises (SEs), more details and clarification are desirable. In particular, most previous theoretical work refers to the nonprofit sector generically and fails to account for the particularities of organizations within a more general definition of SE. This article surveys previous theories and proposes a framework based on the theory of reciprocity and the concept of unconditional reciprocity to interpret a particular kind of SE: the Italian social cooperative.

Since 1997, the U.K. Government has sought to expand the provision of public services by supporting the independent nonprofit sector. With policies to build the capacity of the sector, public spending on voluntary organizations has grown from £2 billion in 1996/1997 to £6.88 billion in 2005/2006. Theory suggests that the comparative advantage of nonprofits lies in the mission motivation of workers, and predicts that motivated workers will accept lower wages. We examine sector wage differentials in time series to show that growth in voluntary sector wages for males has outpaced the private and public sectors, while relative female wages have remained static.