Abstract
We have much to celebrate and our authors and reviewers to thank. The Impact Factor for Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly (NVSQ) was recently released, announcing that NVSQ has increased in standing in terms of ranking (moving to 8th of 39 journals in our classification, from 17th of 37 last year) and in terms of impact (moving to 1.490 from 0.899 last year).
Figure 1 illustrates this rise since 2004. As the field has grown considerably in the last few years, the NVSQ Impact Factor has also grown, testifying to the journal’s enduring influence in academe.
Change in NVSQ Impact Factor since 2004.
As we have explained in a previous issue of NVSQ, these metrics may be flawed in that they underestimate our impact on the field; nevertheless, they are ubiquitous in the field of academic publishing. Thus, we celebrate our success. We could not have achieved it without the support of our authors and especially our reviewers. We extend our gratitude to our managing editor, Micheal Shier, and our SAGE editor, Leah Fargotstein, and her team for their support through the reviewing and production processes. Thank you!
We present in this volume a timely Symposium: “How Values Shape and are Shaped by Nonprofit and Voluntary Organizations: The Current State of the Field.” When our colleagues, Professor Howard Lune from Hunter College’s Department of Sociology at the City University of New York and Professor Edward Queen from the Emory University Center for Ethics, proposed this Symposium, we decided that the topic was worth pursuing for our readers. We therefore invited them as guest editors for this Symposium. These scholars have assembled a set of compelling articles for this volume, prefaced with a review article written by them and Professor Catherine Chen as an introduction for the Symposium. The article discusses current developments in the field of cultural studies and organizational processes.
Cultural studies is a characteristically interdisciplinary academic field of critical theory that began in the early 1960s. It is well suited to understanding the political dynamics of nonprofit organizations and their historical foundations, conflicts, and defining traits. As such, the field is embracing of different approaches, methods, and academic perspectives. In this Symposium, the articles demonstrate why we should seek to better understand the processes by which organizational practices shape values—within organizations and throughout wider society. As we are reminded by the editors, “Cultural studies were once part of the standard toolkit for organizational analysis, as is evident in Weber’s groundbreaking work. After many decades apart, the two fields have increasingly come to rediscover their mutual interests.”
In this Symposium, the authors explore a range of questions arising from the confluence of these two fields and thus highlight the research on “culture in organizations, organizations in culture at large, and the role of human values in organizational processes.” In particular, the volume’s articles focus on the pivotal role that values play in how nonprofits and voluntary organizations foster, or fail to foster, democratic values.
This Symposium’s articles include a range of organizations: Rothschild’s article deals with whistle-blowers in occupations spanning all three sectors; Chen examines the informal mechanism of accountability in the Burning Man organization—an organization whose mission is to develop and protect a community that supports creative expression; Mikkelsen explores a Scandinavian development nonprofit to understand how organizations frame conflicts; Schiller and Almog-Bar dig deeper into the collaborations between a pharmaceutical for-profit and a large Israeli volunteer-based service organization that works with sick, disabled, and elderly people; and Wilson examines the collaborations between Philadelphia nonprofits and local and federal government agencies. The concluding article, by Knutsen, examines values as a self-sustaining mechanism for a nonprofit in Canada. Together, these articles show the influence of values on organizational processes and, vice versa, on a landscape of heterogeneous domestic and international nonprofits.
In addition to the Symposium are articles by Speckbacher, who investigates behaviors within nonprofits and how they are shaped by incentives, and by Jäger and his colleagues, who explore the experience of solidarity on the behavior of nonprofit executives. Finally, this issue is completed with a Research Note by Dumont on virtual accountability, followed by a number of book reviews.
In the coming year, we plan several issues of NVSQ that will continue our tradition of presenting symposia on important issues that will engage readers and advance scholarship in the field. Stay tuned.