Nonprofit interactions with businesses have become increasingly diverse, but which nonprofits establish relationships, and to what extent do relationships depend on the form or type of tie? Focusing on nonprofit collaboration with businesses and donations from businesses, we test arguments based on sociological institutionalism and resource dependence theory. We find that nonprofits relying on earned income, nonprofits led by individuals with management degrees, and rationalized nonprofits all are more likely to report collaborations with businesses, aligning with expectations from institutional theory. For donative ties between businesses and nonprofits, we find that rationalized nonprofits are more likely to have charitable gifts from businesses. However, nonprofits with earned income are less likely to have business donations, and funding diversity has a salient positive effect. These results reveal important but paradoxical institutional and resource dependence effects. We conclude with a discussion of our divergent findings and set an agenda for additional research on the topic.

This study examines the distinction between power imbalance and mutual dependence to better understand how NGOs manage resource dependencies in their relationships with civil society partners. The NGO leaders we interviewed emphasized mutual dependence in the relationships they developed with other NGOs regarding access to financial and information resources. In contrast, discourse about their relationships with IGOs focused on the acquisition of legitimacy and access, and was dominated by power imbalance. NGOs were largely accepting of both forms of dependence in pursuit of the community’s shared goals and for the greater good of constituents. Our finding that NGOs refrain from terminating suboptimal relationships also reflects the extent to which mutual dependence governs NGOs partnering strategies.

In this article we discuss the extent to which service-delivering nonprofit organizations (NPOs) are committed to fulfill an expressive advocacy role, and we look at the advocacy strategies these organizations adopt. Furthermore, we question whether a close relationship with government compromises the NPOs’ willingness to perform these advocacy activities. Based on a large-N sample of more than 250 NPOs in the Flemish welfare sector, our research shows that the overall commitment to an advocacy role was rather low. Rather than focusing on a role as adversary of government, NPOs seek to adopt “softer” strategies such as the use of insider contacts with policy makers, the participation in umbrella organizations or building coalitions with other NPOs. Finally, we found mixed evidences concerning our initial hypotheses. Most importantly, as the dominant source of public income did not stifle the NPOs’ commitment to advocate, we found little support for a resource dependence framework.

Maintenance of legitimacy is central to the survival of any organization and is of particular importance to non-governmental organizations (NGO) reliant on external sources of income. Interaction with the external environment plays an important role in determining organizational legitimacy, shaping actions and determining opportunities. The ability of an organization to effectively respond to and influence the external environment can potentially strengthen its legitimacy. This paper considers the issue of organizational legitimacy by using resource dependence and institutional theories to analyze the development of the Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe (REC). The findings indicate that it is possible for an organization to maintain legitimacy through adaptation, responding to the rise and fall of external opportunities and challenges. As predicted by institutional theory, it also argues that external environmental factors place increasing pressure for conformity over time, limiting scope to manoeuvre over the longer-term.

Key functions of civil society organizations (CSOs) are to criticize governments and to hold them to account. Recent trends of privatization and contracting out challenge CSOs’ opportunities to voice such criticism. The purpose of this article is to analyse whether and why CSOs ‘hold back their criticism’ of public authorities, and how a compromised advocacy can be linked to financial, organizational and institutional factors. The article draws on an original survey of 2678 Swedish CSOs. The analyses show that certain levels of funding make CSOs more likely to hold back in their criticism, but also organizational and institutional factors play a role. The results identify the importance of distinguishing between objective and subjective factors related to how dependency is framed. It is the felt needs, experiences and perceptions of CSOs themselves that make hem prone to the strategic choice to hold back criticism of public authorities.

This paper examines the evolution of the largest university teaching hospital in Ireland, from its origins in 1861 to the present day, drawing upon the lens of resource dependence theory as proposed by Pfeffer and Salancik (1978). Analysing the mission, resources and governance of the hospital, three distinct eras are identified, self-financing, transitionary and that of government/non-profit partnership. The paper demonstrates that despite traumatic events and financial crises this hospital has survived through evolving resource dependence and has preserved its voluntary status notwithstanding its current collaborative partnership with the Irish State.

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.”

This article assesses how strategies applied by Cambodian NGOs to reduce their dependence on external resources affect the sustainability of their mission, program and funding. At the empirical level, the findings suggest that NGO dependence on foreign aid has mixed effects on the organizations such as unpredictability of funding, goal displacement, reduced organizational autonomy, and top-down accountability. Funding from commercial activities is more predictable and potentially promotes bottom-up accountability and increases organizational autonomy but may conflict with the mission-drift of NGOs. At the theoretical level, this article contributes to resource dependence theory by introducing a perspective from developing countries, which implies large power differentials between international funding agencies and receiving local NGOs. The strategic responses employed by local NGO leaders to reduce external resource dependence entail a paradigm shift from external control to local embeddedness and increased autonomy. The findings have important policy implications regarding the regulation of NGO-related and unrelated business activities.

This paper presents a case study and analysis of Co-operation Ireland, a nonprofit cross-border peace and reconciliation organization. The case description traces the interplay between the organization’s development and its operating environment. Three broad, overlapping periods of relationships with different constituencies are identified. The requirements of managing these relationships and their impact on organizational development are highlighted. The pattern of financing of the organization is examined to identify critical, legitimizing relationships. Resource dependence and institutional theory are utilized to analyze the bases for legitimation of the organization over time. It is proposed that nonprofit organizations without independent resources are particularly sensitive to environmental constraints.

Nonprofits continue to be faced with financial challenges to fulfill their missions. Both the academic literature and nonprofit practitioners have explored revenue diversification and concentration strategies to meet these challenges. While these two strategies are essentially antagonistic, both have received support as being viable strategies to create better outcomes for the organization. This article examines whether revenue diversification or concentration strategies lead to greater mission outputs in a nonprofit context. Using resource dependence theory as a guiding framework, two opposing hypotheses are tested to gain more insight into the diversification versus concentration dilemma. A unique dataset is built and utilized to estimate a zero-inflated negative binomial regression model to assess the correlation between revenue diversification and mission outputs. Results indicate that revenue diversification (and not concentration) is associated with an increase in organizational outputs.

Many of the world’s largest and most impactful transnational NGOs are registered in the United States where they engage in significant fundraising activities to support their global operations. Their reliance on the external environment for financial support exposes them to resource dependence and the possibility of external control. However, as civil society organizations organized as firms, transnational NGOs attempt to maintain operational independence from the donors upon which they rely for funding. This article contributes to resource dependence theory by identifying the strategies that transnational NGOs employ in response to resource dependence, explaining the emergence of strategic response, and exploring the conditions under which NGOs are capacitated to preserve organizational autonomy. The responses transnational NGOs employ include alignment, subcontracting, perseverance, diversification, commercialization, funding liberation, geostrategic arbitrage, specialization, selectivity, donor education, and compromise. Elements of this strategic repertoire empower NGOs to resist external control, even circumventing and influencing donor preferences. Findings are based on in-depth, face-to-face interviews with top organizational leaders from a diverse sample of transnational NGOs registered in the United States.

Drawing upon two independent samples from mainland China, we propose and investigate the deterrence function of leadership behavior focused on control. We suggest that controlling leadership, specifically, authoritarian leadership, deters employees’ deviance under certain conditions. That is, authoritarian leadership thwarts employees’ interpersonal deviance behavior when leaders send clear signals of potential punishments of non-compliance by showing low leader benevolence, and when employees are highly dependent on the leaders for important work resources. Results from two independent studies largely support our key propositions. Overall, these results add to the range of possible impacts that a leader can play in decreasing employee deviance. Theoretical implications and directions for follow-up research are discussed.

Publicly traded Chinese firms recently reformed their ownership structuresby converting non-tradable shares, which constituted two-thirds of sharesoutstanding and were held largely by the state, into shares that could tradeon domestic exchanges. To facilitate this reform, tradable shareholders werecompensated with stock grants from non-tradable shareholders. Our analysisfocuses on the level of compensation, the compensation ratio, the ratio of new tradable shares granted to tradableshares outstanding before the reform. Contrary to the predictions ofasset-pricing models, most firms set the compensation ratio around 0.3. Weexplain this surprising convergence using institutional theory. In doing so,we analyze the power and interests of all relevant actors – not just owners,but also state regulators, executives, and other agents — and draw oninsights from resource-dependence and agency theories. We find strongevidence of coercive and mimetic isomorphism, but no evidence of normativeisomorphism. Because our dependent variable is continuous (a ratio), we areable to show that the mimetic effects we observe cannot be attributed tocoercion or norms. Thus, we not only explain an empirical puzzle, we alsoadvance institutional analysis of isomorphism by clearly distinguishingthree isomorphic forces that have been conflated in much previousresearch.