Nonprofit Management Research Articles

Individual Outcomes of Managerial Networking: A Job Demands-Resources Perspective

Previous research has shown that public and nonprofit managers enhance their organization’s performance through external networking. However, compared to the extensive literature dedicated to the positive effects of managerial networking on organizational outcomes, little is known about whether and how networking affects the managers themselves. Against this background, our study investigates individual-level consequences of managerial networking. Drawing from the job demands-resources model, conservation of resources theory, and social capital theory, we propose that external networking may be a double-edged sword for managers. Results from a survey among 129 managing directors of the German Red Cross suggest that managers with the ability to develop external networks are motivated by the support they perceive from external actors and therefore show higher levels of job performance. Simultaneously, our findings indicate that building extensive external networks may be a costly activity. More precisely, we found that external interactions deplete managers’ energetic resources, which leads to higher levels of emotional exhaustion. Aside from these psychological processes, we identified a purely instrumental process that operates in parallel. Accordingly, managers with networking ability gain access to resources, which pays dividends for their job performance. Based on these findings, we derive implications for both networking theory and management practice.

Net impact of government funding on nonprofit fiscal health: burden or benefit?

AbstractThis study examines the impact of federal grant awards on the financial health of recipient nonprofits. Although a modest body of research finds that government grants are beneficial to nonprofit fiscal health, a large Urban Institute study (2010, 2013, 2015) found that nonprofit managers receiving government grants consistently report fiscal harm due to awards that do not cover all program costs, late payments, and significant administrative burden. Those findings raise the question of whether government funding leads to net benefits or net harm for organizations given the administrative and fiscal burdens identified. This study tests that question using a large panel of federal grants to estimate the impact of government awards on three measures of nonprofit financial health. We find that government grants promote an increase in nonprofit size, improve operating margins, and increase financial reserves for recipient organizations. These benefits endure after the receipt of the award.

All Rights Reserved: Behind the Strategic Copyright of “We Shall Overcome”

AbstractIn 2015, musician and non-profit director Isaías Gamboa and filmmaker Lee Butler sued The Richmond Organization (TRO) and its offshoot Ludlow Music over their copyright to the anthem of the civil rights movement, “We Shall Overcome.” The copyright had initially been registered in 1960 and named four white folksingers: Guy Carawan, Frank Hamilton, Zilphia Horton, and Pete Seeger. Suspicious of the white names on the copyright, Gamboa wanted to liberate the song from what appeared to be corporate control. The suit was ultimately successful and the song was placed in the public domain. However, while Gamboa and Butler celebrated their win in a Manhattan court, activists across the South took it as a loss. Although overseen by TRO and Ludlow, the copyright's royalties had long gone to the Highlander Research and Education Center (formerly The Highlander Folk School), a pre-eminent and decades-old grassroots organizing hub best known for its work with such icons as Rosa Parks, Septima Clark, and Dr. Martin Luther King. The money was housed there in the We Shall Overcome Fund, which had been created by cultural workers of the civil rights movement in collaboration with those named on the copyright to facilitate the redistribution of royalties to Black artist-activists across the South. Far from facilitating theft, the copyright had strategically scaffolded Black-led community organizing for nearly 60 years. This article traces the history and work of this remarkable effort to turn the civil rights movement's anthem into its most lasting cultural tool.

Beyond revenue diversification: Service diversification and service costs in nonprofit acute care hospitals

AbstractMany nonprofits are multi‐service organizations that provide a range of services. However, how nonprofits manage their service portfolios has not received much scholarly attention in nonprofit management research. In this research note, informed by studies on product diversification in strategic management research in the business management literature, we explore the effect of a nonprofit's service diversification on its service costs, using nonprofit hospitals as an empirical context. Through a longitudinal study of U.S. nonprofit acute care hospitals, we find that a nonprofit hospital's level of service diversification is associated with a decrease in its average service costs. Further, both related diversification and unrelated diversification are associated with a decrease in average service costs, but the association of related diversification is greater. This research note informs an understudied line of inquiry in nonprofit management research and calls for more research attention to nonprofits' service portfolios.

Editors' Notes on Themed Issue on Civil Society Education: East Asia

This is the fourth themed issue in the Journal of Nonprofit Education and Leadership (JNEL) in which researchers around the world examine regional and national training and education programs for individuals with civil society leadership roles. The issue has its origin in a post-conference airport meeting a few years ago between one of the editors of this series of themed issues and a set of prominent scholars from East Asia. As most researchers would confirm, the value of a research conference is seldom found in the various seminars or panels, but rather in the unplanned encounters that take place at breakfast, over a coffee, or—in this case—at the airport. The mere airport happenstance turned out to be the beginning of several valuable research initiatives. Since then, among other things, the authors and the editors have met and organized public disseminations, including the Nonprofit Higher Education Research Summit at he ISTR International Conference in 2021. The overall result is not only a significant contribution to the series of themed issues, but also, and more importantly, the first mapping of programs in nonprofit and nongovernmental management education in East Asia.

Recognizing the Plural Sector: Nonprofit Studies in a Business School Environment

The “best place” debate centers on which disciplinary setting is best for degree programs in nonprofit management education. We contribute to the discussion by reflecting on the constraints and opportunities intentionally identified in a developing program within an established business school. We ground our work in the nonprofit sector’s interdependence with the market and public sectors, and identify opportunities for reciprocity within a business school setting. Finally, we identify cultivating interdisciplinary relationships as a strategy to ameliorate tension between a competitive vs. collaborative “forced choice” approach.

Nonprofit Management Education in Taiwan

Nonprofit management education has grown exponentially worldwide. In Taiwan, in response to the rapid growth of the nonprofit sector, universities are increasingly offering nonprofit courses and programs that train students interested in this area to gain relevant occupational capabilities. We asked the following questions. 1) Which nonprofit courses and programs are offered in Taiwan?, 2) What are the characteristics of nonprofit management education in Taiwan?, and 3) Where are the identified nonprofit courses and programs situated? To explore the nonprofit courses and programs provided by higher education institutions in Taiwan, we in turn built the first database of nonprofit courses and programs offered in Taiwan. We discovered 681 courses offered at 104 universities and 38 nonprofit management-related programs offered at 26 universities from 2018 to 2019.

Logit Model for Estimating Non-Profit Organizations’ Financial Status as a Part of Non-Profit Financial Management

The non-profit sector plays an important role in the American and European continents, as non-profit organizations support the development of civil society and help people in need. However, most non-profit organizations (NPO) are financially dependent on various donors from the private sector. Nowadays, non-profit organizations focus on improving their non-profit financial management. This research aims to assess the financial status of Slovak non-profit organizations, using binary logistic regression. The initial sample includes 351 Slovak NPOs, which are divided into a training and test sub-sample. The data were obtained from Amadeus, FinStat, the Ministry of Finance of the Slovak Republic, and the Ministry of Interior of the Slovak Republic. The logit model shows that the significant variables are equity ratio, debt ratio, operating margin, and type of NPO using the statistical–analytical program IBM SPSS 25. The model also implies that non-profit organizations should focus on the revenue structure and revenues from the sale of products. The prediction model correctly classifies 97.03% of NPOs in the training sub-sample and 96.61% of NPOs in the test sub-sample. Moreover, more than 70% of vulnerable NPOs are correctly classified.

Beyond survival mode: Organizational resilience capabilities in nonprofit arts and culture fundraising during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Organizational resilience remains an under‐explored topic in the nonprofit management literature (Searing et al., 2021). Despite an increasing number of studies framed by management perspectives and organizational theory, their focus is on how forprofit organisations react against external crisis by developing ‘resilience capabilities’; ways of understanding and of working designed to reduce uncertainty and restore balance to the organisation (Lengnick‐Hall, et al., 2011; Williams et al., 2017). This article draws on literature on ‘resilience capabilities’ and on in‐depth interviews with nonprofit fundraisers, carried out during the early stages of the Covid‐19 pandemic, to examine how they compensated for a sudden drop in financial revenue by devising alternative, strategic ways of fundraising. It argues that non‐profit fundraisers deployed cross‐capability building, which combined and merged emotion‐related and behavioural capabilities to achieve strategic, practical results.

Research on SPOC Blended Teaching Mode——Taking ‘Nonprofit Management’ for Example

This study attempts to explore the teaching process and teaching effect in curriculum ‘Management of Nonprofit 
 Organizations’ through a hybrid teaching mode based on SPOC (small private online courses, SPOC). In this study, 32 undergraduate 
 students who majored in administrative management were randomly divided into two groups; the control group adopted the 
 traditional teaching mode, and the experimental group adopted the SPOC blended teaching mode. After the end of each group’s 
 study, theoretical tests and questionnaires are conducted to evaluate the teaching effect of each group. The results showed that the 
 students in the experimental group had significantly higher academic performance and course satisfaction than the students in 
 the control group. The SPOC blended teaching mode helps to motivate students to achieve better results in the test. The blended 
 teaching mode helps students flexibly allocate learning time and make full use of teaching resources. It is a new teaching mode 
 suitable for students who take nonprofit management classes to learn.

Course concept understanding and skill transfer as correlates of intent to recommend an experiential MBA non-profit governance course

The growth of non-profit organizations has led to a proliferation of non-profit management education (NME) courses across different curricula. We use survey data from a two-semester NME course with a substantive board service requirement to investigate what affects students’ intent to recommend an NME course to other MBA students. Drawing 65 responses from predominantly MBA students who had completed the course between 2011 and 2018, we found that course concept understanding and skill transfer affected students’ intent to recommend. Implications for practice are discussed.

The Dissonance of “Doing Good”: Fostering Critical Pedagogy to Challenge the Selective Tradition of Nonprofit Management Education

Nonprofit management classrooms are filled with students who yearn to “do good” in the world and yet, in practice, they confront a dissonance between their vision of doing good and the realities of nonprofit work. This dissonance is in part created by contemporary nonprofit management education (NME) through the development and perpetuation of a selective historical tradition of the nonprofit sector which mythologizes the sector and its work. These traditions and myths of the nonprofit sector are based squarely in white American and Eurocentric values and downplay the histories of people of color and thus perpetuate whiteness as central to nonprofit norms and practice. We present a critical reading of these histories in an effort to help educators and students reclaim and reimagine the histories of the nonprofit sector and offer tenets of a critical pedagogy that emphasizes historical consciousness and a praxis of emancipation so that nonprofit educators and students can re-envision nonprofit theory and practice in the future.

Utilization of Strategic Marketing in Nonprofit Sector - Evidence from Turkish Nonprofit Organizations

Marketing has always been an important research topic for researchers and practitioners where it often focuses on the private sector and commercial businesses, marketing of non-profit organizations is gaining more importance recently. The reason is non-profit organizations are competing with each other in order to attract new volunteers, allure financial donors and build up their reputation. To achieve these aforementioned objectives, strategic marketing is an invaluable concept that can be utilized by non-profit organizations to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Within this context, aim of this paper is analyze how non-profit organizations in Aegean Region in Turkey incorporate strategic marketing aspects into their organization’s marketing plans. To achieve this aim, semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with the chair boards, managers and marketing managers of non-profit organizations located in Aegean Region in Turkey. Overall, 6 in-depth interviews were conducted. Result of the study revealed that non-profit organizations in this study are aware of the strategic marketing concept and utilize some of its aspects in their marketing activities albeit not deliberately. Findings also indicate that internal situational analyses are widely used while planning marketing activities, but not external ones. Numerous suggestions and managerial implications are provided for better utilizations of strategic marketing concept. Limitations and future recommendations are mentioned.

Nonprofit capacities and emergency management during the COVID-19 pandemic: Insights from a Taiwan-based international nonprofit organization.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, some nonprofit organizations (NPOs) have been struggling to maintain their operations, while others are able to coordinate with partners to provide programs and services locally and globally. This study explores how NPOs are able to survive and actively engage in local and global COVID-19 responses by investigating the organizational capacities of the Tzu Chi Foundation, a Taiwan-based international NPO. This study employs interview data and secondary data from a variety of sources to answer the research questions. Through this case study, we find that Tzu Chi Foundation's capacity to coordinate local and global COVID-19 issues quickly, broadly, and effectively can be attributed to three main factors: (1) clear mission and charismatic leadership, (2) rich experience of disaster relief and recovery strategies, and (3) committed and active volunteers. Moreover, we find that financial management capacity and adaptive capacity are two crucial kinds of capacity for enabling the Tzu Chi Foundation to survive and continuously engage in emergency responses during the pandemic. We conclude with implications for future nonprofit capacity and emergency management research.

Exploring the gendered dimensions of meaningful non-profit work under marketised conditions

Neoliberal marketisation is altering the nature of non-profit work, leaving workers to navigate a ‘double bind’ of mission- and market-based values. Some feminist scholars suggest these dynamics are particularly challenging for female workers. Drawing on a larger study of meaningful non-profit work and neoliberal marketisation as well as on contemporary critical and feminist scholarship, this exploratory study examines how neoliberalism’s entrepreneurial subject manifests along gender lines among non-profit managers. Data from interviews with 28 non-profit managers demonstrate that while both men and women evoke elements of neoliberalism’s entrepreneurial subject, female managers wrestle more with conflicting discourses of market and mission values and rhetoric as well as sociocultural expectations around gender, resulting in a ‘triple bind’. This article suggests that neoliberal market discourses are impactful in the manner suggested by feminist scholarship but not necessarily totalising nor deterministic.

Building Nonprofit Management Education in the US: The Role of Centers in Supporting New Academic Disciplines

Nonprofit and philanthropic studies (NPS) is a visible presence at American universities and has achieved academic credibility. This study analyzes the role of academic centers devoted to the nonprofit sector in institutionalizing NPS as a distinctive academic field. It relies on a survey and selected case studies to map nonprofit academic centers and assess their field-building efforts. We find 55 US-based nonprofit academic centers that vary in size, revenue streams, and institutional location. Centers offer a broad range of services that span academia and practice supporting the local and regional nonprofit communities. Both endogenous and exogenous factors supported the founding of these centers, whose sustainability relies on interdisciplinarity, internal and external funding, and institutional support. We propose an evolutionary explanation for NPS’s institutionalization.

Editor’s Note

Nonprofit Management and LeadershipVolume 32, Issue 3 p. 337-339 EDITOR'S NOTES Editor’s Note First published: 01 March 2022 https://doi.org/10.1002/nml.21504Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume32, Issue3Spring 2022Pages 337-339 RelatedInformation

Building Nonprofit Management Education in the US: The Role of Centers in Supporting New Academic Disciplines

Building Nonprofit Management Education in the US: The Role of Centers in Supporting New Academic Disciplines

The Hybridization of Meaningful Nonprofit Work: An Exploratory Study of the Effects of Marketization on Nonprofit Managers’ Sense of Meaningfulness in Work

Nonprofit work is oftentimes viewed as inherently meaningful work, but the world of nonprofit work is changing by becoming increasingly marketized. These changes are impacting nonprofit workers’ conception and experience of meaningful work. Drawing from scholarship on neoliberal marketization, enterprise culture, and meaningful nonprofit work, this exploratory study examines how an increasingly marketized work environment is influencing nonprofit managers’ experience of meaningful work. Findings from interviews demonstrate that nonprofit managers conceive of and experience meaningful work in expected ways (e.g., through serving others). At the same time, findings indicate that their experience of meaningful work evokes elements of enterprise culture. These findings suggest that meaningful nonprofit work is becoming hybridized such that it evokes both prosocial and neoliberal market values. This in turn necessitates a reconsideration of the motivations of nonprofit workers as well as our understanding of the mechanisms by which the nonprofit sector is becoming marketized.

Sector Distinctiveness v. Cross-Sector Commonalities: Are There Qualitative Differences in Graduate Nonprofit Management Education Offered Through Public Service and Business Programs in the United Kingdom?

Previous research on nonprofit management education (NME) in the United Kingdom (UK) has raised the question of whether NME provided through public service departments will focus more on third sector distinctiveness, while NME provided through business schools will concentrate more on general, cross-sector management skills. We collect data on courses offered within UK graduate degree programs with an NME concentration and compare them using Mirabella’s (2007) taxonomy and find that there is more commonality than differences between graduate NME offered in both business and public service programs in the UK. However, statistically significant differences in the provision of courses as a proportion of total curriculum do exist for courses related to “advocacy, public policy, and community organizing,” “financial management,” and “social enterprise.”