Ben Suykens, Filip De Rynck & Bram Verschuere, Ghent University
As previous posts on this blog demonstrate, recent nonprofit management research is preoccupied with the idea that nonprofit organizations (NPOs) are increasingly becoming ‘business-like’ by incorporating corporate norms, values and practices. Scholars are generally critical of this supposed trend, highlighting that NPOs may well gain resources, influence and the opportunity to deliver more services but at great cost to mission, values and voluntary contribution. Continue reading “Are all nonprofits becoming more ‘business-like’?”
Happy 2020! As we embark on a new year, we—the editorial team of Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Quarterly working closely with Sage—are proud to present to you this virtual special issue of Editors’ Choice. These fourteen (14) articles were published in various issues of NVSQ between January 2018 and December 2019. We have selected and curated them into this virtual collection to draw attention and provide ease of access to particularly distinctive, high-quality work in different genres. Some have already been highly-cited over the past two years (for example, the top-cited article on use of social media by nonprofit advocacy organizations by Guo and Saxton); others we expect will be widely read and used to inform new research, but may not yet have high citations because they were published more recently.
As a collection, these articles showcase the diversity of topics as well as the conceptual and methodological innovations that characterize NVSQ. The topics cover accountability and governance, revenue diversification, cross-sector partnerships, giving and volunteering, civil engagement, policy advocacy and social entrepreneurship. This collection is also broadly international, as is every issue of the journal. We hope you find this special collection of articles interesting, relevant, and inspiring.
The articles will be open for free download for the next two weeks. Enjoy!
Christian King, University of Central Florida & Gregory B. Lewis, Georgia State University
Do nonprofit organizations overpay or underpay their employees? One theory argues that employees choose to accept below-market pay so that they can do meaningful work for organizations whose missions they believe in. Nonprofits might even intentionally underpay workers so that only highly motivated people will apply.
An opposing theory argues that nonprofits overpay because they have fewer incentives to hold down wages. Nonprofits have tax advantages that private firms do not, meaning that they can create surpluses more easily, and they cannot give any “profits” to owners. Instead, they can share those surpluses with other stakeholders – with customers (through lower costs or higher quality services) and with employees (through higher wages).
Lindsey M. McDougle, Rutgers University; Danielle McDonald, Northern Kentucky University; Huafang Li, Grand Valley State University; Whitney McIntyre Miller, Chapman University; Chengxin Xu, Rutgers University.
Experiential philanthropy is an innovative teaching and learning approach that allows students to study social problems and then invest funds into nonprofit organizations that they consider to be best able to solve the social problems they learn about. Experiential philanthropy has become widespread within higher education and many within the field have begun recognizing its potential for developing future philanthropists. Despite this potential, there has been little evidence of the effectiveness of experiential philanthropy on students—or, communities. Therefore, we conducted a study to explore learning and development outcomes associated with the use of experiential philanthropy in the college classroom, and to ultimately answer the question: Can philanthropy be taught?Continue reading “Can Philanthropy be Taught?”
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