The notion that civil society and democracy go hand in hand has been a cornerstone of modernization theory. The formation of civil society, so the argument went, contributed to the democratization of society and provided the backbone of democracy. If one follows such an interpretation of modernization and of modern society, monarchic systems should be void of civil society. And yet, the case of Germany shows that civil society developed and even flourished within a monarchic society. The Kingdom of Prussia in 1865 was the home to an extensive network of civil society organizations that included associations, endowments, and foundations. These organizations provided services in the fields of education, social welfare, and supported all kinds of cultural institutions. These organizations were essential for the functioning of Prussia’s public institutions. Donors who created these institutions had a voice in the shaping of monarchic society, and the visions of donors often coincided with the visions put forward by monarchical rulers. The number of Prussians involved in giving, the number of organizations created, and the amount of money given were truly astonishing. Between 2 and 3% of Prussia’s population was involved in civil society organizations. The funds provided by these organizations accounted for 20–30% of public-school funding. And the number of organizations created a tight network that spanned across the entire country. Nineteenth-century monarchic Prussia was not void of civil society as it should have been if American social scientists are correct. Instead, Prussia provided the home to a vibrant civil society. Civil society emerges when societies move from an agrarian and organized system of social hierarchies to an industrial, and traditional social hierarchies destroying system. The destruction of established social hierarchies, the creation and accumulation of wealth, and the emergence of social inequality provided powerful incentives for the formation of civil society. Since this economic modernization and transformation occurred not only within democratic societies such as the USA but also within monarchic societies such as Prussia, civil society developed in both types of political system

Public scrutiny and the need for funds in a more competitive environment are pressuring nonprofits to be more consciously aware of their reputation. This study used automated analysis with text mining and topic modeling of 177 articles directly linked to nonprofits’ reputation and published up to 2016. After identifying the most salient topics and conducting an in-depth, critical review of the most significant articles within each topic, four theoretical and managerial implications were identified. First, managers need to develop skills to deal with risk, the Internet, and social networks. Second, risk management is an emergent, still tentative, but important topic waiting for more contributions. Third, researchers can apply lexicons developed and validated by experts to uncover knowledge relevant to the entire nonprofit sector’s organizations. Last, the trends and topics highlighted can help scholars and practitioners make better decisions in research or responses to management challenges.

It has been well documented in recent years that nonprofits are becoming increasingly marketized. What is less well understood from this body of research is the variation of marketization in the nonprofit sector and how it is made manifest in nonprofit organizations. This article aims to fill this gap in knowledge by recounting the results of a comparative case study of two nonprofits. We examine their marketization through a multifaceted theoretical framework that allows us to document the marketization comprehensively and to posit some preliminary explanations as to why this variation is occurring. Our findings indicate that one organization is adopting a strong entrepreneurial orientation while the other is integrating its traditional community orientation with more professionalization. The differentiation witnessed in the case organizations suggests that marketization is best understood as a situated process that may in part be explained by varying strategic responses to institutional pressures.

Individuals seek food assistance from both government and nongovernmental services. The theory of voluntary sector failure asserts that governments act where nonprofits fail. How, if at all, does this theoretical approach provide insight into basic food provision through food pantries? We conducted a single embedded case study of one network of food pantry programs (n = 298) in one county of approximately 3 million people in the southwest of the USA. We used a survey (n = 137) to measure programmatic and organizational capacity and, then, categorized capacity measures into the four failure categories identified in the theory of voluntary sector failure. We found moderate to strong evidence of failure in all of the categories; however, we also argue that these data do not necessarily support the theory of voluntary sector failure. Two key nuances are identified.

While trust is a valuable relational asset for nonprofits, it is fragile and once broken can cause a great deal of damage to the organization. Therefore, once it is lost after a crisis event, valid strategies are needed to rapidly repair the trust. Although trust repair mechanisms have been widely studied, little is known about the way trust changes over time and the methods needed to repair trust and even less is known about trust in nonprofit organizations. Therefore, two studies were conducted in this paper using the three causal attribution dimensions from attribution theory to reveal how trust in a nonprofit can be damaged and repaired. It was found that the attribution cause significantly influenced the trust repair process; that is, when the cause had a higher locus of causality, stability, and controllability attribution degrees, it was more difficult for donors to forgive the organization. While reducing the controllable attribution of individuals was not found to effectively repair trust, reducing the locus causality or stability had a more significant effect. It was also found that the three specific strategies of denial, diminishing crisis, and rebuilding played a critical role in trust repair for nonprofits influenced by the locus of causality. This study provides a useful framework for nonprofit practitioners seeking to effectively respond to crises and win back the trust of their current and potential donors.

Civil societies are usually seen as facilitators of democracy or as oppositional powers withstanding authoritarian rule. However, more and more often civil society organizations (CSOs) appear to contribute to the legitimacy of non-democratic incumbents. Taking the example of contemporary Russia, this paper argues that state funding for CSOs under authoritarian regime conditions serves for securing regime legitimacy in two respects—by supporting CSOs contribution to public welfare and by transmitting state-led legitimacy discourse to the civil society sector. The analysis of applications submitted between 2013 and 2016 to the Presidential Grant Competition (PGC), the biggest public funding programme for CSOs in Russia, shows that the state is (1) supporting CSO activities above all in social, health and education-related fields, and (2) privileging projects that relate to a state-led conservative public discourse not only but foremost within those welfare-related fields. These results highlight the importance of investigating state support to CSOs in order to access the changing role of civil society under authoritarian regime conditions.

This paper explores a network of organizations and their perspectives on the social enterprise commodity. Based on ethnographic research, I present the case of recycled bags sold in the city centre of Vienna (Austria) by three organizations, including a work integration social enterprise. By reviewing two different strands in the organizational studies literature that both employ biological notions to theorize (social) enterprising, I argue that opposing “hybridity” to “ecosystems” is a suitable way to assess two different research agendas in that field. While I subscribe to the ecosystem focus—seeing organizations as a function of the social environment—I make the case for the importance of research into “hybrid commodities” as a way to explore larger issues concerning social enterprise scholarship, such as mission drift, hidden agendas or organizational identity work.

In the context of an entrenched food bank system, there is broad recognition of the need to move beyond charity-based models of emergency food provision. Drawing on our experiences from a multi-year community–university partnership in the city of Guelph and Wellington County, Canada, we describe the process whereby discourse and practice surrounding emergency food provision shifted over time. We detail the results of two interconnected research projects (one with service providers and one with service users) that contributed to these shifts. In addition, we detail the collaborative process following the completion of the projects, which culminated in the creation of a new organization with a mandate to address some of the challenges highlighted through the research projects. We demonstrate how a community–university partnership can contribute to shifts within discourse and practice surrounding emergency food provision with the intention of enhancing community food security.

Since the 2008 economic crisis, social service providers worldwide have reported funding cuts, while the need for some social services has been increasing. This paper examines the combined and longer-term effects of such divergent developments on the nonprofit social services sector. The empirical analysis uses Austrian administrative data on six subfields of the sector covering the years 2003–2017. We investigate significant changes in the trends of four growth indicators applying interrupted time series analysis. We find that the 2008 economic crisis is associated with persistently lower growth rates in Austria’s nonprofit social services sector. The magnitude of this dampening effect differs across subsectors. Additionally, our findings suggest an increase in market concentration. Hence, the study discloses a long-term scarring effect of the economic crisis on Austria’s social services sector, raising doubts on the sector’s future resilience.

This paper reports on a case study of collective coproduction in an Australian community-based disaster risk management (CBDRM) project called “Be Ready Warrandyte”. The first goal of the case study was to understand what interactions and power-sharing between citizens and government “looked and felt like” in a significant example of community-led CBDRM in an Australian context. Its second, broader goal was to test the extent to which foundational coproduction theory, specifically four conditions proposed by Elinor Ostrom for enabling coproduction that is more effective than either government or citizen production alone, can explain the citizen-government interactions, roles and contributions that enable successful community-led CBDRM. The study confirms that each of the four conditions—complementarity, authority, incentives and credible commitment—also apply to community-led as well as government-led initiatives. It reinforces the central importance of complementarity for avoiding offloading of risk, responsibility and cost to citizens from government, while also suggesting that specific sources of internal and external authority, incentives, and credible commitment are especially important when coproduction is community-led. It identifies leadership and its impacts on government-citizen relationships and power-sharing in coproduction as an important area that needs further research.

We examine Twitter data to assess the impact of media exposes on the reputations of two international nonprofits, Oxfam and Save the Children (STC). Using a random sample of 6794 Tweets, we study the daily gap between positive and negative sentiments expressed towards these organizations. The “unweighted gap” and the “weighted gap” (weighted by the number of followers) of the Twitter handle follow broadly the same trajectory with high fluctuation in response to new negative or positive media stories. Twitter handles with large audiences amplify variability in weighted gap. While Oxfam’s reputation did not fully recover to pre-Haiti levels even 6 months after the scandal, STC’s reputation returned to pre-scandal levels in 8 days, although it fluctuated in response to new revelations. Overall, reputation recovery for both organizations was aided when they received celebrity endorsements and focused public attention on their positive activities, especially by linking to visible global events.

This study is an empirical investigation of the survey data from 109 social enterprises, nonprofit and for-profit, in Illinois, the USA. We compare sources of startup funding and revenues of social enterprises by the organizational form. Findings reveal that nonprofit social enterprises do not significantly differ from their for-profit counterparts in sources of startup funding. But the types of revenues differ by the organizational form of social enterprises. Nonprofit social enterprises are more likely to rely on foundation grants and government grants as their primary sources of revenue, while for-profit social enterprises are more likely to rely on revenues through sales.

With an increasing need for social innovations that rely on cross-sector partnerships, traditional ways of managing and leading human service nonprofits are undergoing rapid changes. Utilizing a qualitative, grounded theory approach, with data collected from a sample of nonprofit leaders of human service organizations in Pennsylvania, USA (n = 31), the research findings identify clear characteristics of leadership that support undertaking social innovations. Respondents characterized leadership orientation and responsibilities in relation to the demands of blending across sectors and roles within organizations. Findings from this study provide key insights into areas of leadership development that may lead to effective partnerships and stakeholder engagement to better support social innovations.

Organizational transparency has become a prominent concern for the nonprofit sector as it expands globally. Transparency is important to organizational accountability, which may be indicated by how nonprofits allocate their resources. In this study, we examine the relationship between nonprofits’ transparency and their resource allocation to programs, administration, and fundraising. Our study focuses on China, where a nascent nonprofit sector is playing increasingly significant roles in social development while facing public trust challenges. Based on Agency Theory and Resource Dependence Theory, we propose two hypothesized frameworks that link transparency to resource allocation, and use the 2013–2015 China Grassroots Organizations’ Transparency Survey data (n = 370) to test this relationship. Our results suggest that nonprofits with higher transparency allocate more resources to programs rather than administration, a possible result of the current public scrutiny of nonprofit accountability in China. Our findings provide implications for nonprofit practitioners and future research about the significance of organizational transparency, particularly in emerging nonprofit sectors.

Food insecurity manifests itself on a continuum, and we note that it can range from absolute food insecurity to relative food insecurity, especially in the context of affluent countries. We focus on one such relative food insecurity that manifests itself when Dutch children cannot afford the culturally appropriate foods to participate birthday celebrations in primary schools, which is a long-established local custom. The inability of children to celebrate their birthdays in this public manner leads to school absenteeism, stigmatization, and social exclusion. This case study analyzes an intervention undertaken by Jarige Job, a Dutch nonprofit, that recognized and addressed this hidden social problem by using existing networks and infrastructures of national foodbanks. It provides insight into how a unique intervention of providing birthday boxes has become a successful social innovation that not only combats this relative food insecurity but is also able to address and mitigate the challenges of moral and cognitive legitimacy.

Nonprofits are strategically using social media to disseminate information, engage with community, and mobilize activities. The use of social media has attracted increasing academic discussion in the recent years. By challenging the proposition that online presence is always beneficial to nonprofits, we argue that seeking an online presence is itself a strategic choice; social environment as well as resource dependence would fairly affect nonprofits’ decision either to join the cyber world or just stay offline. Based on analysis of 427 social service nonprofit organizations in Hong Kong, we find that nonprofits that depend on private funding are more likely to use social media, while those depend on government funding are less likely to appear online. We further examine the nonprofits’ activeness and effectiveness of social media using, and find that informational posts generate the most “likes,” while actional posts are more likely to be diffused through “shares.”

We report qualitative findings from a study in a multi-ethnic, multi-faith city with high levels of deprivation. Primary research over 2 years consisted of three focus groups and 18 semi-structured interviews with food insecurity service providers followed by focus groups with 16 White British and Pakistani women in or at risk of food insecurity. We consider food insecurity using Habermas’s distinction between the system and lifeworld. We examine system definitions of the nature of need, approved food choices, the reification of selected skills associated with household management and the imposition of a construct of virtue. While lifeworld truths about food insecurity include understandings of structural causes and recognition that the potential of social solidarity to respond to them exist, they are not engaged with by the system. The gap between system rationalities and the experiential nature of lay knowledge generates individual and collective disempowerment and a corrosive sense of shame.

This paper examines the humanitarian work of Taiwan’s Tzu-Chi in the U.S. and discusses how the work in the U.S. has facilitated Tzu-Chi in becoming a global humanitarian NGO. Founded in 1966 by a Buddhist nun and a group of women in Taiwan, Tzu-Chi is now the largest civil association working in Taiwan and a reputable humanitarian INGO. However, the internationalization of Tzu-Chi is often taken for granted. This paper problematizes the internationalization process and engages with two theoretical perspectives—resource dependence and structural opportunity. Both perspectives cannot properly explain Tzu-Chi’s internationalization process. Drawing on historical materials and engaging with social movement theories, we argue that the U.S. experience has offered (1) cognitive liberation; (2) learning of new organizational forms. This study provides a rare case study on how a non-Western NGO becomes an INGO and offers a co-evolutionary angle to the internationalization process.

Uncertain political boundaries and formal cooptation institutions often make NGOs in China self-censor on sensitive issues. A growing body of literature has focused on various strategies NGOs proactively adopt to circumvent formal restrictions and manage the risk of participation. However, a comparative case study from a four-month fieldwork in this paper reveals a previously neglected aspect of state-NGO interaction, i.e., how do NGOs perceive and process the information they get? We find that endorsement outside of the formal institution—a retired official in our case—is not perceived as credible because the retired official does not have to bear the consequence of miscalculation. On the contrary, endorsement from local supervision institution is perceived as credible. Paradoxically, the credibility comes from the institutional design that originally intends to make restriction and monitoring effective. Our study suggests that while NGOs have various ways to seek endorsement, not all of them are perceived as credible. State, as the creator of uncertainty in the first place, is also the ultimate solution for it.