Volume 16, Issue 4

The nonprofit sector has been portrayed as resilient, describing a sector that persists despite challenges. We investigate nonprofit resiliency by examining how organizational characteristics, strategies, and community factors equipped organizations to recover following economic recessions. Utilizing a fixed effects panel regression model, our study covers a period of 29 years (1989–2018), encompassing three economic crises in the United States. The primary focus is examining the sector’s financial health and the resilience of the constituent organizations. Our findings describe a sector buoyed by the resilience of larger and older organizations, earned revenue, and contribution revenue, as well as the role of community factors in influencing the sector’s resilience. This study examines a wider timeframe and employs a more expansive sampling approach compared to previous studies on nonprofit resilience. In doing so, it contributes valuable insights to our understanding of the resilient sector .

It is a perennial challenge for different political organisations, including environmental NGOs (ENGOs), to accommodate diverse social and political groups’ interests, opinions, and experiences. Without sufficient inclusiveness, ENGOs struggle to help create social and political change at a much faster pace, with climate action in Australia being a key example. In this regard, this paper argues that inclusiveness needs to encompass three dimensions, diversity, equity, and procedural justice, which are critical to managing internal tensions, disagreements, and conflicts. Evidence from two different ENGOs, the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) and Extinction Rebellion Australia (XR Aus), shows that despite different types of organisational structures and resource availability, there are different challenges and opportunities for the two ENGOs in trying to establish and maintain higher inclusiveness. While diversity remains challenging to both groups, XR Aus’s self-organising and decentralisation have much easier access to decision-making and autonomous participation than ACF. However, it remains to be seen if XR Aus could harass its organising features to establish and maintain a higher level of procedural justice. These findings are relevant not only to issues in climate action problems but also to other collective action problems such as ethnics equality, domestic violence, income disparity, and gun control.

Scholars investigate philanthropy’s ability to effect change but pay less attention to strategies changing practices within the philanthropic sector. The Cooperative Assistance Fund (CAF) pioneered program-related investments (PRIs) as a philanthropic strategy that merged commercial and philanthropic logics, thus moving beyond traditional grantmaking practices. Adopting an institutional work perspective, the study describes the types of institutional work that promote a new philanthropic model. Historical evidence shows that CAF’s leadership reframed philanthropic approaches (framing work) and developed strategies influencing policy (political work), promoting PRIs (cultural work), and supporting interested foundations (technical work), but failed to develop a clear identity around these strategies (internal practice work). Taking advantage of historical methods, the study historically embeds the diverse types of institutional work that were employed, showing how these practices were often more reactive than proactive. The study contributes to our understanding of PRIs in linking their limited use to tensions between different institutional logics, while paradoxically contributing to the establishment of market-based approaches.

This study investigates the effect of organizational social capital (OSC) in non-profit organizations on communal social capital (CSC) in the communities where these organizations operate. The study has two goals: First, to theoretically establish rational for the relationship between internal organizational social capital (IOSC) and external organizational social capital (EOSC), especially with relation to public administration agencies in liberal democracies where social capital plays a major role in public policy. Second, to empirically analyze the reciprocal relationship between EOSC, CSC, and IOSC which constitutes an important product of the optimal public administration model in modern nations. A theoretical model was developed to study these relations and suggest several hypotheses. The field study was conducted in 72 community centers operated by the Israel Association of Community Centers. Participants were 1,015 employees (72 general managers, 501 middle managers, and 442 line employees) and 1,816 community members. The findings demonstrate partial support for the relationship between IOSC and EOSC and indicate that IOSC has a moderating influence on the relationship between the EOSC and CSC. Implications and suggestions for future studies in public organizations and their social and administrative sphere are highlighted.

This study mainly takes China as an example to explore the logic between government regulation and outputs of nonprofit organizations in the context of authoritarian countries. Based on the theory of embeddedness and organizational legitimacy, using the panel data of 29 mainland provinces from 2010 to 2019, and applying the fixed effect model, it is found that government regulation has a positive effect on outputs of non-profit organizations. However, it is also found that there exists a single threshold, only government regulation intensity keeps in a certain range, the positive effect is made. Further research finds that government regulation positively impacts nonprofit outputs through encouraging social donations. Our findings fill the gap of exploring the logic between government regulation and nonprofits outputs, giving some enlightenment to regulators of similar regimes countries. We also have improved the current government regulation theory based on legitimacy and embeddedness theory empirically, extended and enriched embeddedness theory.