Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly

Nonprofit organizations experience a tension between pursuing their social missions and meeting the demands of a market economy. This mission-market tension is an everyday, practical concern for nonprofit practitioners. Yet, scholars know very little about how nonprofit practitioners define and manage this tension. Drawing on contradiction-centered perspectives of organizing, data from an ethnographic study of a single U.S. nonprofit organization demonstrate that the mission-market tension was defined and managed by organizational members as both a contradictory and interconnected phenomenon. This framing was enabled by specific communication practices that supported a productive and generative relationship between these seemingly incompatible goals. Findings suggest that the mission-market tension is an inherent condition of nonprofit organizing and highlight the central role of communication in successfully managing mission and market concerns.

This essay provides the very first account of the historical size and scope of German philanthropy from the mid-19th century to the 1950s. Our historical-statistical analysis of various unpublished and published sources about associations, foundations, and endowments supports an interpretation that suggest that foundations and endowments were important sources of financing for many public institutions in Germany. Our article dispels, thus, commonly held notions about the marginal position of philanthropy in German society and further suggests that philanthropy should be acknowledged as an important source for organizing and structuring modern German society.

Recent decades have witnessed shifts in the division of labor among actors in the public, nonprofit, and private sectors, leading in part to new forms of governance. Indeed, some recent scholarship argues that nongovernmental organizations may go beyond their provisional and advocacy functions to play a much more central role in actually governing by contributing directly to public decision-making and action as part of the governing process. This article examines the governance roles of neighborhood organizations acting to shape community action in Chicago and their relationships with local government. It finds that while engaging in governance processes in both direct and indirect ways, neighborhood organizations often function at the interstices of public and private action created by absences or gaps in state policy or by local action. Developing these liminal spaces may be important to increase the influence of neighborhood organizations and their capacity to contribute directly to governing.

In the face of increased accountability pressures, nonprofits are searching for ways to demonstrate their effectiveness. Because meaningful tools to evaluate effectiveness are largely absent, financial ratios are still the main indicators used to approximate it. However, there is an extensive body of literature on determinants of nonprofit effectiveness. In this study, we test the extent to which these assertions in the literature align with practitioner views. To increase the practical value of our comparative exercise, we create a self-assessment survey on the basis of the practices that find support in both academia and practice. This provides managers with a tool to assess the extent to which the identified practices are present in their organizations and with suggestions, which might lead to improvements in their effectiveness. Intermediaries can use the tool to provide better information to donors. Funders can use it in their selection of grantees, and capacity-building efforts.

This article aims to contribute to the long-standing discussion about nonprofit organizations’ (NPOs) dependence on public funding and its consequences on their advocacy role in modern societies. Drawing on resource dependence theory and data from a quantitative survey, the study investigates the impact of public funding and its extent on nonprofit engagement in advocacy. Traditionally, scholars have cautioned that NPOs reliant on public sources will hesitate to pursue political objectives and to engage in advocacy work. Yet, empirical findings are strikingly inconsistent. One of the reasons for these ambiguous findings may be the way advocacy is measured. To address this issue, we apply two different approaches to evaluate NPO engagement. Both sets of findings from our multivariate analyses of Austrian NPOs suggest that public funding does not have a negative impact on advocacy.

Internal branding refers to an organization’s attempts to persuade its staff to buy-in to the organization’s brand value and transform it into a reality. Drawing from self-determination theory and leadership theory, we seek to develop a deeper understanding of the process of internal branding in the nonprofit sector. More specifically, we propose and examine the mediating effects of the staff’s emotional brand attachment, staff service involvement, and the moderating effect of charismatic leadership on the brand orientation behavior–organizational performance relationship using data obtained from the representatives of 301 nonprofit organizations in the United Kingdom. On a general level, the findings suggest that staff emotional brand attachment and staff service involvement are linked to brand orientation and organizational performance. Moreover, charismatic leadership increases the strength of this linkage. All of these findings extend the literature on internal branding.

This study offers hypotheses concerning differences in organization design among for-profit (FP), nonprofit (NP), and local government (LG) organizations. We empirically examine design in a sample of 105 Minnesota nursing homes, using data from an original survey. The findings generally support our hypotheses: (a) NP and LG nursing homes delegate more decision-making authority to their nurses than their FP counterparts, (b) NP and LG nurses enjoy greater efficiency wages than their FP counterparts, (c) NP homes rely more on the social networks of their employees to recruit new employees than FP and LG homes, (d) FP tend to use more performance-based incentives than NP and LG, and (e) there is little difference in the extent to which FP, NP, and LG homes monitor their nurses. The differences that we do detect are significant but are probably tempered by regulation, market competition, and institutional pressures for similarity.

This qualitative study explores the deinstitutionalization of peacebuilding in Ireland and how the core population of peacebuilding organizations are responding. We document organizational responses to the understudied phenomenon of deinstitutionalization—the weakening and dissipating of an institutionalized set of practices and beliefs. We rigorously map the field and population under study, illustrating the challenge and necessity of delineating a field of actors involved in a complex social process. This research contributes to understanding deinstitutionalization in two ways. First, we illustrate how organizations both adapt to and resist the challenge of deinstitutionalization. Second, organizations can act as custodians of outgoing traditions, turning to their communities and engaging in defensive institutional work, which seems to enhance their organizational survival.

The objective of this research is to determine the extent to which the effects of a business–nonprofit partnership (BNPP) go beyond those associated with their traditional roles of donor and beneficiary. Specifically, the study focuses on foundations as a distinct, fast-growing type of nonprofit, and evaluates the influence of engaging in partnerships with businesses on the not-for-profit organization’s (NPO) development of innovations, capacity building, visibility, scale of operations, funding, and mission accomplishment. We propose that stable relationships based on greater perceived value, communication, lower conflict, trust, and commitment improve innovation in nonprofits and give rise to a process of capacity building and better performance indicators. Empirical research is based on a survey of a representative sample of 325 Spanish foundations. Structural equation techniques served to analyze the data. The results confirm the positive effects of this type of BNPP.