Abstract
It gives us great pleasure in this issue of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly (NVSQ) to congratulate the authors of the 2012 NVSQ Best Article Award presented at the 2013 Annual ARNOVA (Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action) Conference held in Hartford, Connecticut, in November. The winners this year are Anaïs Périlleux, Université de Mons, Belgium; Marek Hudon, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium; and Eddy Bloy, Université Lyon-2, France, who coauthored the article, “Surplus Distribution in Microfinance: Differences Among Cooperative, Nonprofit, and Shareholder Forms of Ownership.”
Microfinance institutions (MFIs) have garnered a great deal of recent attention, both positive and negative, in how they deal with helping the poor access credit. Using an existing database on MFIs, the article examines how different types of MFIs, nonprofits, for-profits, and member-based MFIs allocate their financial surplus to the various stakeholders. The authors find that the institutional form and ownership type of the MFIs matter and determine how the surplus is allocated. These findings are of great importance for policy makers, who face an increasingly commercial landscape in which for-profit MFIs operate with attendant high interest rates that are controversial and antithetical to helping the poor for whom MFIs were originally designed.
Bravo, Anaïs, Marek, and Eddy! And, thank you to members of the ARNOVA award committee, Rikki Abzug, Tricia Bromley, Claudia Petrescu, Jennifer Taylor, and Jeremy Thornton. Committee members read all NVSQ articles published in 2012 and selected the article that best answers an important question based on theoretical rigor and analytical sophistication with clarity of presentation.
Award winning articles are no doubt the product of the ingenuity and intelligence of the authors. Yet, no good article stands alone in the absence of input and guidance from colleagues. Behind the scenes, the anonymous peer reviewers for NVSQ helped to improve the article, and they share with the authors the accolades of this award.
Thank you to the reviewers of this article, you know who you are! We thank as well all other reviewers for NVSQ, who work to make every article worthy of an award.
Although the peer review process is an integral part of publishing in academic journals, in its current form is relatively recent; the journal Nature instituted formal peer review only in 1967 (http://www.nature.com/nature/history/timeline_1960s.html). According to Mario Biagioli (2002), the formal process of peer review started in 1663, when the recently formed Royal Society of London passed a resolution that required every book published under its Royal Charter to be reviewed by two members of the Council of the Society. They did this to insure that all publications were relevant to the Charter, and that the Crown would not consider them offensive (Ranalli, 2011).
We are pleased that this inaugural issue of Volume 43 of NVSQ features a topical symposium on Nonprofit Advocacy and Engagement in Public Policy Making. The symposium, edited by Professors Hillel Schmid and Michal Almog-Bar, University of Jerusalem, alerts the nonprofit sector to the importance of the advocacy function. As the relationship between government and civil society changes in different countries, many nonprofit organizations find that they are losing or have neglected the value of advocating for the audiences they serve and represent. Nonprofit organizations have the right to advocate for (or against) policies, and some authorities go so far as to suggest that this role is critical to individual nonprofits and to the sector as a whole. The articles included in the symposium examine this role and the meaning of nonprofit advocacy in different contexts. A critical review of the advocacy activities of human service organizations by the symposium editors sets the stage for an examination of the potential influence of funders when they direct nonprofits’ advocacy efforts in the United Kingdom, by Jung, Kaufmann, and Harrow. In their article, Guo and Saxton turn their attention to the growing phenomenon of using social media to help bring about change and the significant role that Twitter can play in helping nonprofit advocacy. The final two articles in the symposium, by Garrow and Hasenfeld, and by Greenspan, stimulate NVSQ readers to probe and understand advocacy by nonprofits from alternative theoretical lenses.
The symposium provides an in-depth look at advocacy. It is followed by four articles that contribute to the breadth of NVSQ. The combination of depth and breadth of topical coverage is one of the primary attractions of NVSQ. These articles encompass a range of topics from the evaluation of funding sources and the determinants of repeat donations, to the influence of ownership status on client perceptions and ethnic identity in German American Societies.
Happy reading!