After Haiti's 2010 earthquake, over half of U.S. households donated to thousands of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in that country. Yet we continue to hear stories of misery from Haiti. Why ...have NGOs failed at their mission?Set in Haiti during the 2004 coup and aftermath and enhanced by research conducted after the 2010 earthquake,Killing with Kindnessanalyzes the impact of official development aid on recipient NGOs and their relationships with local communities. Written like a detective story, the book offers rich enthnographic comparisons of two Haitian women's NGOs working in HIV/AIDS prevention, one with public funding (including USAID), the other with private European NGO partners. Mark Schuller looks at participation and autonomy, analyzing donor policies that inhibit these goals. He focuses on NGOs' roles as intermediaries in "gluing" the contemporary world system together and shows how power works within the aid system as these intermediaries impose interpretations of unclear mandates down the chain-a process Schuller calls "trickle-down imperialism."
The nonprofit sector serves an increasingly important entrepreneurial role in the economy. Scholars have taken an interest in entrepreneurship in nonprofits and have drawn upon entrepreneurial ...orientation (EO) as a methodological tool to advance knowledge in this domain. However, the nonprofit context differs from the for–profit context for which the EO scale was developed, particularly with regard to motivations, processes, and outcomes. We propose a new approach for capturing the manifestation of EO in the nonprofit context. A typology is presented to highlight the multiple facets of EO in the nonprofit context. We conclude with implications for scholars and practitioners.
This paper analyzes the roles of social entrepreneurship and transformational leadership in explaining the social value and the organizational performance of non-profit social organizations. By ...evaluating the role of socioeconomic context as the moderating variable, the results confirm the strong influence of social entrepreneurship on social value and the effects of social entrepreneurship and transformational leadership on organizational performance. The socioeconomic context proves to be an important moderator of the hypothesized relations. In an unfavorable context, transformational leadership becomes relevant in explaining social value and organizational performance. However, in a favorable context, social entrepreneurship provides more significant support to social value and organizational performance, and social value itself also has an effect on organizational performance.
Although mission statements are widely adopted as an important strategic tool, their effective influence on organizational performance are not firmly established due to a lack of consistent results ...in relevant literature. To shed light on this relationship, the present study proposes a model to examine the mediating role of organizational commitment in explaining and clarifying the mission-performance link. Another merit of this paper is to consider mission as a formative construct.
Adopting a quantitative methodological approach, this study reports findings obtained from a representative sample of 112 non-profit health care organizations operating in Portugal. Our findings clearly demonstrate that the relationship between mission statements and organizational performance is better understood if the influence of organizational commitment, as a mediating variable of the aforementioned relationship, is taken into account. This study concludes by discussing conceptual contributions, limitations and possible future research avenues.
The growing social media use worldwide has encouraged researchers to research on how and why it is adopted. However, the majority of studies have focused on the individual rather than the ...organizational level. There is also a relative paucity of research on organizational level factors that affect the use of social media applications by non-profit organizations (NPOs). Hence, this study aims to bridge this gap in research by analyzing the factors that determine social media use, which leads to increasing the effectiveness (i.e., awareness, community engagement, and fundraising) of NPOs. The data were collected through questionnaires distributed to public relations practitioners in 325 NPOs in Jordan and analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM). The results supported the vital role of performance expectancy, effort expectancy, facilitating conditions, social influence, and management commitment on the actual usage of social media. The results also showed that using social media has a significant positive effect on awareness and community engagement, while no significant impact is reported regarding fundraising. Theoretically, this study extends the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) by incorporating new factors, namely management commitment, awareness, community engagement, and fundraising, and proposing new relationships in the model. Practically, this research provides implications for stakeholders of NPOs, including policymakers and public relations practitioners.
•Factors affecting the use of social media by NPOs.•UTAUT is selected as a guiding theory to propose the theoretical model.•UTAUT factors and management commitment impact social media use.•Social media use influences awareness and community engagement.•Social media use does not influence fundraising.
There is an increasing interest from scholars and practitioners in understanding how non-profit organizations can design and implement human resources (HR) practices to enhance desirable volunteer ...attitudes and behaviors. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of existing studies on the relationship between HR practices and volunteering outcomes. We use the ability-motivation-opportunity model as a guiding framework to systematically integrate current knowledge on this topic. We identify gaps in existing research and offer detailed suggestions on how scholars can further enhance knowledge on how HR practices can lead to beneficial outcomes for both volunteers and non-profit organizations.
Interest in open innovation (OI) as a field of research has grown exponentially since the phrase was coined by Chesbrough in his 2003 book, with numerous articles, special issues, books, and ...conference sessions. Various reviews of the literature have summarized prior work, offered new frameworks, and identified opportunities for future research. Here we summarize these opportunities, which include more research on outbound OI, the role of open innovation in services, and network forms of collaboration such as consortia, communities, ecosystems, and platforms. Research should also examine the use of OI by small, new, and not-for-profit organizations, as well as the linkage of individual actions and motivations to open innovation. Other opportunities include better measuring the costs, benefits, antecedents, mediators and moderators of the effects of OI on performance, and understanding why and how OI is rejected, abandoned, or fails. Finally, we consider how OI can be better linked to prior theoretical research, including topics such as absorptive capacity, user innovation, resources, dynamic capabilities, business models, and the definition of the firm.
We study how globalization can differentially affect financial inclusion through the lens of microfinance. Based on an institutional logics perspective, we argue that MFIs embody both social logic ...and market logic with regard to provision of affordable microfinance loans. Speicially, social logic is amplified by greater social globalization and the stronger presence of nonprofit organizations (NPOs) in the microfinance industry. In contrast, economic globalization catalyzes MFIs' market logic, leading to weaker or greater affordability of microfinance, depending on the relative strength of the profit-maximizing motive and real competition. We test these predictions by focusing on MFI interest-rate setting and using longitudinal data from 2030 MFI observations across 50 countries from 2002 to 2012. We find that country-level social globalization measure is negatively associated with the average MFI loan interest rates and that country-level economic globalization measure has an inverse U-shaped relationship with the average MFI loan interest rates. These results support our hypotheses and suggest a more nuanced view on how globalization affects affordability of microfinance.
•MFIs embody both social logic and market logic with regard to provision of affordable microfinance loans.•Social globalization increases the affordability of microfinance;•Economic globalization has a U-shaped relationship with the affordability of microfinance.•Stronger presence of non-profit organizations in the microfinance industry accelerates effect of social globalization.
► This review focuses on nonprofit organizations’ governance effectiveness. ► The perspectives of multiple nonprofit (NPO) stakeholders are taken into account. ► The complexity of and the need for ...stakeholder management in NPOs is revealed. ► Insights are offered in how to improve the governance practices of NPOs.
Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) are increasingly required to become (more) effective. This review summarizes and integrates the results of studies focusing on NPOs’ governance effectiveness. It proposes an extension of stakeholder theory to NPOs concerning governance involving diverse stakeholder groups. What makes this paper innovative is that it aims to identify more than effective board governance, and takes the perspectives of multiple nonprofit key stakeholders into account. This approach is particularly valuable as numerous researchers argue that the likelihood of NPOs being perceived as effective increases when they manage to align the, possibly very diverse, expectations of stakeholders on good governance. We consequently focus on the relationship between (1) the needs and objectives of key stakeholders and (2) (expected) governance (structures) in NPOs. The stakeholders we consider are government, beneficiaries, private donors, board members, management, volunteers, and non-managerial staff members. Results not only show the lack of attention some stakeholders have received in the literature, but also the governance related conflicting needs and objectives between stakeholder groups. In addition, even in the same stakeholder groups it is not rare that opposing findings are reported. Several studies indicate the (unforeseen) negative impact on (being accountability to) other stakeholders when NPOs try to be responsive to the needs and objectives of a particular stakeholder group. The value of this review lies in the fact that it reveals both the complexity of and the need for stakeholder management in NPOs, if they want to be perceived as (more) effective by their numerous stakeholders, and related to that gain insight in how to improve their governance practices. Numerous directions for further research are suggested.
Purpose
This paper aims to inform the discussion on why and how non-profit organizations can experience a hybridization process to address the criticism that would assume hybridity as an intrinsic ...characteristic of all organizations. Specifically, by referring to the academies of intellectuals as the non-profit setting in which investigating the emergence of hybridity takes place, this paper aims at exploring, first, to what extent this emergence could be induced by institutional conditions, and, second, which structural innovations could sustain the academies’ “motion” towards hybridity.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper relies on the institutional logics perspective and adopts the case study method applied to a historical context. The case under analysis is the Academy of “the Immobili”, which, in spite of its name, experienced a hybridization process in 1720 because of the decision to involve an impresario in the management of its theatre.
Findings
The findings highlight the significant role played by institutional conditions in inducing the emergence of hybridity, even in presence of internal resistance to any “motion” from the non-profit setting. Moreover, the analysis of the innovations associated with this emergence detects the intertwined action of the different decision makers involved in the hybridization process, in spite of their formal separation. These findings strengthen the conceptualization of hybridity within non-profit organizations.
Originality/value
Besides referring to a historical period that is still little explored in terms of hybridity within organizations, the paper focuses on an original context, i.e. academies, representing an ancient typology of cultural organizations. Therefore, the paper also provides the first insights into the hybridization process of cultural organizations from a historical perspective.
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