Passing or Dropping the Baton? Local Area Deprivation, Volunteer Leadership Succession and the Survival of Charitable Organisations

Abstract

Institutional theories of ‘local area effects’ hypothesise that local area differences in organisational resources are an important feature of inequality in individuals’ residential environments. However, while the organisational dimension of local areas has been identified as an important research priority within urban sociology, empirical work remains limited, with charitable organisations particularly under-researched. Therefore, a key question remains unanswered: why do charities in more deprived local areas have higher dissolution rates, reinforcing a lower prevalence of charities compared with less deprived areas? This article focuses on this research problem. It shows that volunteer leadership succession is less prominent in more deprived local areas, and that this more limited leadership succession helps explain why charities in more deprived areas experience higher dissolution rates. The results promote understanding of a mechanism underlying local area differences in organisational dynamics that lead to persistent differences in institutional resources between more and less deprived local areas.