This research note identifies seven key dimensions of the nonprofit sector that nonprofit stakeholders want to monitor to assess the sector’s condition, including financial resources; human ...resources; the diversity of nonprofit boards, staff, and clients; the impact of the nonprofit sector; advocacy activity; ethical and legal behavior; and the existence of a supportive environment. The article then describes current measures of these dimensions, noting the shortcomings of many of these measures. Two government data sources, the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPAs) and the Current Population Survey (CPS), are highlighted that contain timely information about the nonprofit sector but which, to date, have been underutilized by sector stakeholders. Next, the article describes the picture of the nonprofit sector that emerges from the relevant measures before concluding with discussion of further work needed to improve measurement of the sector.
The pandemic has illustrated the need to examine the vital role of the community nonprofit sector. While the nonprofit sector is known for innovatively responding to societal needs—to be resilient—it ...is also underresourced and precariously situated. The hollowing out of social welfare under neoliberalism shifted service responsibility onto nonprofit providers, justified through the framing that precarity drives resilience. With the magnification of need during the pandemic, the “response resilience” of the sector was put to the test. This article studies Canadian reports on surveys of the community nonprofit sector during the pandemic to assess the state of the sector and to examine tensions between precarity and resilience. Evidence illustrates a community nonprofit sector in crisis and the limits of neoliberal resilience.
La pandémie illustre le besoin d’examiner le rôle vital du secteur à but non lucratif communautaire. Bien que l’on sache que ce secteur répond de manière innovante aux besoins sociaux—celui-ci est résilient—il manque de ressources et se retrouve dans une situation précaire. Le néolibéralisme a miné les services sociaux, imposant la responsabilité de ceux-ci aux organismes sans but lucratif avec comme justification l’idée que la précarité accroît la résilience. Par surcroît, l’augmentation des besoins pendant la pandémie a mis la résilience du secteur à l’épreuve. Cet article étudie des rapports canadiens sur le secteur à but non lucratif communautaire pendant la pandémie afin d’évaluer l’état de celui-ci et d’examiner toute tension qui puisse sévir entre précarité et résilience. La recherche montre d’une part un secteur communautaire à but non lucratif en état de crise et d’autre part les limites de la résilience néolibérale.
Although most research focuses on person-organization fit to explain public service motivation (PSM)' s influence on job choice, this study investigates the independent effects of both ...person-organization fit and person-job fit using a policy capturing research design and a sample of first-year law students. Our findings suggest that PSM may play a more important role in person-job fit than person-organization fit. Consistent across three sectors of employment, individuals with stronger PSM were more likely to accept jobs that emphasize service to others-whether that be pro bono work (private sector), client interaction (public sector), or client representation (nonprofit sector). After controlling for characteristics that influence person-job fit, PSM neither increased the likelihood that individuals would accept a public sector job nor decreased the likelihood that they would accept a private sector job. Among other things, our findings suggest that sector may be an inaccurate proxy for values that are often taken for granted in PSM studies.
Relational pressures across multiple levels push organisations to behave socially responsibly or sometimes irresponsibly. But how do relational pressures across multiple levels influence social ...responsibility of small nonprofit organisations working with marginalised groups? Nonprofit organisations are increasing in importance owing to their role in development and representation of marginalised groups’ interests, yet their social responsibility is little understood. Using the lens of standpoint theory, we explore social responsibility of small disability arts organisations in the nonprofit sector in Australia drawing on 53 interviews involving actors at multiple levels, supplemented by site visits and observations. We find small nonprofit organisations’ social responsibility in a state of flux, influenced by differing priorities, expectations, and demands from various actors across levels. We provide insights into organisational social responsibility dynamics, identifying three major tensions that small arts organisations face – formality versus informality, agency versus representation, and access versus excellence – in seeking to be socially responsible. Our findings have relevance for organisations in the wider nonprofit sector, underscoring the need to explore their social responsibility from a relational perspective. Further, the resultant tensions from relational pressures, as identified in our study, provide important implications for organisational social responsibility advancing theoretical and practical knowledge in this emerging field.
Theories of nonprofit density have assumed a variety of dispositions toward the state, including opposition, suspicion, indifference, and mutual dependence. In this article, we conduct the first ...large-scale simultaneous empirical test of the two most prominent nonprofit theories: government failure theory and interdependence theory. The former characterizes nonprofit activities as substitute or oppositional to state programs, accounting for the limitations and failures of government-provided services and more reflective of the heterogeneity of demand for services. The latter emphasizes the more complementary and collaborative nature of nonprofit activities, focusing on the overlapping agendas of nonprofits and the state and the mutual dependency that arises from partnership. The theories are difficult to test empirically because both predict the same relationship between state capacity and the size of the nonprofit sector, albeit for theoretically distinct reasons. A true joint test requires the separation of government support from private support for nonprofits. Using a newly constructed panel dataset in which we separate out nonprofit revenue sources normally agglomerated in the Internal Revenue Service 990 data, we examine the empirical merits of both theories to answer the question of whether human service nonprofit organizations thrive when government fails or when government collaborates. Our findings suggest that government funding has a more favorable effect on nonprofit density than private donations. The findings raise several policy and management implications that need evaluation.
Do government activities discourage or leverage nonprofit activities? The extant literature has proposed competing lines of arguments, making the net effect ambiguous. The present study conducts a ...meta-analysis to synthesize extant studies concerning the relationship between the level of government activities and the level of nonprofit activities within a locality and explore potential moderating effects. Through systematically reviewing 30 extant studies, the study finds a mostly positive association between the level of government activities and the level of nonprofit activities, but this relationship is generally weak and sometimes statistically insignificant. In addition, the moderator analysis concludes that data structure, unit of analysis, and field of activity significantly moderate effect size estimates across extant studies. Overall, the net relationship between the level of government activities and the level of nonprofit activities within a locality ranges from null to slight positive. Government activities generally seem not to discourage nonprofit activities, but may slightly leverage them.
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.
Historical institutionalism is increasingly acknowledged as a promising theoretical platform in the field of nonprofit sector studies. The main goal of the paper is to review major applications of ...historical institutionalism to the nonprofit sector, with a particular focus on how this theoretical platform illuminates the responses of Czech nonprofit organizations to the Covid-19 crisis. In addition, the paper contributes to the conceptual toolbox of historical institutionalism, a novel approach of the retrograde analysis of events. Drawing on the Luhmannian systems theory, the events are taken to reflect system-building processes occurring at the level of nonprofit organizational fields, and comprise the mutual succession of critical junctures and the periods of relative stability in the evolution of the nonprofit sector. Applied to the context of the Covid-19 pandemic in the Czech Republic, the proposed approach allows to infer the high probability of new critical junctures. Given the enormous challenges and the growing resource deficits faced by Czech nonprofit organizations, many of their existing path-dependencies will be likely broken, with new ones being called into life.
Applying retrospective design methodology, the article adds to our knowledge about inherited organisational values and their impact on management policies and practices. Questioning the label of ...Central and Eastern European workforce as low-motivated, shirking and passive, this article outlines the historical context of work motivation in former communist countries, investigating to what extent the motivation in public service organisations today may be explained by the past. It employs a framework developed by
that connects management intentions to organisational and employee outcomes to analyse the malfunctions of the former rewards system and to examine how those impairments continue to influence public sector motivation today.
Confirming Inglehart’s ‘scarcity’ theory, this article demonstrates that the several decades that passed after the fall of communism were insufficient in completely overcoming communist heritage. Malfunctions of the centralised communist motivation system resulted from the discordance between the management intentions and actions. Dysfunctions of monetary-based incentive schemes caused overwhelming work lethargy of shirking employees, who were discouraged from being creative or displaying initiative. Such patterns have still been observable at some public organisations in former Soviet countries. Thus, the past centralisation of the state continues to determine individual work motivation in public sector domains even today.
This paper analyzes how professional values and practices influence the character of nonprofit organizations, with data from a random sample of 501(c)(3) operating charities in the San Francisco Bay ...Area collected between 2003 and 2004. Expended professionalism in the nonprofit world involves not only paid, full-time careers and credentialed expertise but also the integration of professional ideals into the everyday world of charitable work. We develop key indicators of professionalism and measure organizational rationalization as expressed in the use of strategic planning, independent financial audits, quantitative program evaluation, and consultants. As hypothesized, charities operated by paid personnel and full-time management show higher levels of rationalization. While traditional professionals (doctors, lawyers, and the clergy) do not differ significantly from executives with no credentialed background in eschewing business-like practices, managerial professionals champion such efforts actively, as do semi-professionals, albeit more modestly. Management training is also an important spur to rationalization. We assess what is gained and lost and the tension that can arise when nonprofits become professionalized and adopt more methodical, bureaucratic procedures.
