The impact of the global recession has served to increase resource pressures on voluntary organizations in many social service sectors, serving to constrain the choices that organizational leaders can make in the face of changing resource niches. Not all organizational leaders face the same set of viable choices in the face of both changing demands from funding bodies and highly dynamic resource niches. Drawing on theories of organizational change, it is possible to identify three key factors that will serve to limit the tactics that voluntary organizations can employ: niche-level dynamics, niche density, and the presence of organizational champions. These three factors are illustrated through an analysis of the effects of the economic recession in Northern Ireland on two subsectors: community development and youth-serving organizations. We conclude with a call for greater theoretical and empirical development of the resource niche as the appropriate unit of analysis.

Tax exemption is a defining characteristic of nonprofit organizations and of the nonprofit sector. Exemption has most often been studied in the context of federal income tax and local property tax. This study offers a state perspective. States do not require nonprofit organizations to pay income tax, property tax, or sales tax when making purchases. States do require nonprofits to collect and remit tax when engaged in the sale of goods and some services. Purchases appear to fit the broad normative definition of charitable laid out in federal law. Sales by nonprofits may be considered commercial activity, prompting states to adopt a more narrow definition of charitable. This study found that states that depend more on sales tax revenue were more likely to require remittance of sales tax when nonprofits regularly engaged in the sale of taxable goods and less likely to formally exempt sales tax on purchases.

This article presents results of an embedded comparative case study about central strategists realizing strategies in a large nonprofit organization characterized by decentralized and inverse structures. Inverse structures lead to a paradoxical situation in which strategists of a nonprofit’s central office have to make deliberate decisions about resource allocation while having no authority over the implementation of strategic decisions. Legitimation is a crucial element in the creation and realization of new strategies. The authors thus ask the question: How do strategists achieve the legitimation and realization of strategies without formal authority? The findings show that, in all of the observed four strategies—also in the process of formalization—strategists of the central office built on emergent strategies that they supported in their legitimation by three steps: Strategists supported the strategy’s negotiability (pragmatic legitimation), continued supporting its reasonability (moral legitimation), and finally its comprehensibility (cognitive legitimation).

The nonprofit sector has become an arena of increased political contestation. Rather than being shaped passively by global trends and broader power relationships among social classes and organizations, the nonprofit sector and the larger civil society have increasingly become forces shaping social and political developments. To account for how these forces unfold in different countries, one needs to go beyond social origins theory, the power-distributional account, and sociological institutionalism and draw on concepts from historical institutionalism that explicitly consider how dynamic interactions between institutional forces and long-term historical changes shape patterns of political contestation. By examining the developmental trajectories of environmental NGOs in South Korea, this article explains how political contestation—embedded within institutional and historical processes of critical junctures and path dependence—may shape developmental trajectories of the nonprofit sector.

After nearly 20 years of democracy-building projects in Russia, a robust civil society has yet to develop. While researchers have suggested political conditions, misaligned incentives, or the unintended consequences of Western funding as possible reasons for this situation, the impact of culture on civic organizations has been overlooked. This article draws on ethnographic research of civic organizations in Novosibirsk, Russia to illustrate the impact of national and organizational culture on emerging civic organizations. Most civic organizations in Russia are influenced by cultural legacies of patronage and personalism, Soviet-style collectives, and group boundaries reinforced through taking tea. Reproduction of these cultural norms results in bonding social capital rather than the bridging social capital associated with democratic society. The ongoing structuration of civic organizations through the reproduction of tsarist and socialist legacies illustrates the importance of understanding the cultural contexts of civil society development.

Psychological research has found that women score higher on most measures of the traits, motivations, and values that predict helping others, and women are more likely to help family and friends. However, sex differences in the institutional helping behaviors of volunteering and charitable giving are small. This article seeks to explain this apparent contradiction with the hypotheses that men have more resources and more social capital than women, which compensates for their lower level of motivation. The article tests these hypotheses using data from the 1995 Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) survey. The data show partial support for these hypotheses, as men score higher on measures of income, education, trust, and secular social networks. However, women have broader social networks through religious participation.

The No Child Left Behind legislation stipulates that schools offer volunteer opportunities to parents. This study examines the growth patterns of parent volunteerism after implementation of this legislation by national region, metropolitan status, gender, ethnicity, and immigrant status. Using the Bureau of Labor Statistics survey data on volunteers between 2002 and 2008 in a 2-year increment, we find the rate of parental volunteering for education actually decreased since 2002. Even after controlling for parents’ social-demographic characteristics, the likelihood of parents’ engaging in educational volunteering is still lower in 2008 than in prior years. Those who live in the Midwest region and nonmetropolitan areas are more likely to volunteer for education. Mothers, non-Hispanic Whites and citizens also have a higher chance of being involved in educational volunteering. In addition, Hispanic parents in the West are more likely to volunteer for education than their counterparts in the Northeast and South region.

Eighty-five arts and culture nonprofits were surveyed to determine the extent to which their financial and managerial practices conform to Sarbanes-Oxley and the New Form 990. Approximately half of the sample had audit committees that included unpaid financial experts. Almost all of the nonprofits engaged external accountants or CPA firms to conduct annual audits, but only 40% required their ED or CFO to sign the financial statements. Approximately half of the nonprofits had conflict of interest forms, written ethics policies, and whistle-blower policies. According to the results, the most important reason for voluntarily complying with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) was because it promotes sound financial management and "contributes to an internal culture of transparency." Compliance was less motivated by donor retention, board directives, or fear of governmental regulation. This survey found that the size of a nonprofit’s annual operating budget and its age are directly related to its level of compliance with SOX.

In this article, the question of whether differences in four structural models of charitable behavior make any difference to the findings regarding the major determinants of philanthropic contributions is addressed. Using data from Independent Sector’s Giving and Volunteering Survey, giving and volunteering equations using the standard Tobit model, the "Heckit" model, the Cragg model with uncorrelated errors, and the Cragg model with correlated errors are estimated. Results indicate that the generalized two-stage approaches are far superior to the standard Tobit model for both monetary donations and volunteer time. For monetary giving, parameter estimates of the second-stage contribution equations are similar across the three alternative two-stage methods and there is no evidence of correlation between the first- and second-stage error terms. Second-stage estimates for volunteering from the Heckit and Cragg models with correlated errors are also similar and offer compelling evidence of correlated error terms.

This article examines decision making in the partnerships between three private aid agencies and their local partners in Ghana, India, and Nicaragua. Drawing upon a mixed methodology, the article maps the relative influence of these partners vis-à-vis the agencies and reveals the processes underlying decision-making outcomes. Three main findings are advanced: (a) Institutional rules regulate per topic the extent in which partners can participate in the decision making, ranging from exclusion to full decision-making authority; (b) four clusters of decision-making topics were identified reflecting the different degrees to which partners are allowed to participate in the decision making; and (c) while partners’ ability to influence decisions above all is affected by the institutional rules, some have more influence than others depending on their organizational capacity and their respective project-officer.

Nonprofit organizations often depend on volunteers, so volunteer retention is an important priority for these organizations. Yet volunteers may be on the periphery of communication, particularly when it comes to voicing feedback to others within the organization. The present study examines volunteers’ satisfaction, motivations, and the ways in which those volunteers respond to problems in the organization. Results indicate relationships between participants’ satisfaction and motivation and their responses to problems. Motivation, satisfaction, and responses to frustrating events all affect volunteer retention. The theoretical implications of these results regarding volunteer voice and retention are discussed as well as practical implications, which suggest that nonprofit organizations should be more intentional in terms of volunteer motivations, ensure that volunteers feel supported and have opportunities to connect with other people in their volunteer work, and encourage volunteers to express their ideas using considerate voice.

Many depictions of social enterprises underemphasize the role of government in supporting their mission and operation. This article provides a conceptual framework and analysis of government’s financial role in one form of nonprofit social enterprise that we identify as a tri-value social enterprise. The main argument is that some forms of social enterprises are better characterized as tri-value social enterprises because their revenue sources explicitly derive from the nonprofit, for-profit, and public sectors. This analysis extends Moore’s (2000) three-part framework that distinguishes values-based differences in sources of revenue among for-profit, nonprofit, and governmental organizations. The case of the Seattle nonprofit FareStart provides an illustrative example of a tri-value social enterprise because both direct and indirect government-based revenues support FareStart’s operation as a social enterprise. The article discusses the implications for researchers and practitioners of identifying tri-value social enterprises.

Relying on social preference theory and on poverty trap literature, this article suggests a richer and more nuanced role of the third sector as an institution complementary to the state and to the market in an economy’s development process. Social preferences are considered as the micro—fundaments of the third sector in that this promotes activities, laws, and organizational forms coherent with those preferences. The third sector contributes to overcoming poverty traps not only by spreading behavior based on altruism and solidarity but also by promoting investments in welfare services and human capital and by favoring the access of all the agents to the various markets.

Despite the socioeconomic interest that is associated with volunteer work, the practice of valuing it is limited, and few scientific advances have been made. In this context, this study first analyses why these advances are scarce, paying special attention to the limitations of micro- and macro-accounting systems, including volunteer work accounts. It then proposes a method with heuristic capacity for valuing the various economic dimensions of volunteer work. The third part of this article applies this proposal to social and environmental volunteer work in the Spanish region of Valencia. The conclusions bring to focus the fact that whereas the technical obstacles faced in conducting empirical analysis are not insurmountable, obstacles of a sociopolitical nature and of scientific mindsets continue to hinder the advance of research in this field of the social sciences.

"Can state–society synergy be created in the short run, or does it require historically deep institutional and normative foundations?" In other words, what role can an outside party—such as a government or state actor—play in constructing social capital when it is not a permanent fixture of the existing interrelationships within a community? Taking a network perspective, this exploratory research examines community-level social capital outcomes of a government-led intervention. Operationalized as social networks, social capital is measured as an increase to the strength of weak ties and reduction in redundancy among exchange relationships. Findings suggest that state–society synergy has the potential to increase bridging social capital in communities. In addition, communities with higher levels of cohesion and connectivity pre-intervention results in greater increases to social capital, and although trust plays a crucial role in development of social capital, the influence organizations are perceived to have does not.

The authors present an overview of the academic literature on charitable giving based on a literature review of more than 500 articles. They structure their review around the central question of why people donate money to charitable organizations. They identify eight mechanisms as the most important forces that drive charitable giving: (a) awareness of need; (b) solicitation; (c) costs and benefits; (d) altruism; (e) reputation; (f) psychological benefits; (g) values; (h) efficacy. These mechanisms can provide a basic theoretical framework for future research explaining charitable giving.