Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations

This article puts the current cooperative pattern of state-nonprofit relations in France into historical context against the country’s statist past and suggests the implications this experience may have for other countries that share the statist background that France, perhaps in somewhat different form, also embodies. To do so, the discussion first reviews the current shape of the French nonprofit sector and the substantial scope and structure of government support of nonprofit human service delivery that exists. It then examines the unfavorable historical background out of which the current arrangements emerged and the set of changes that ultimately led to the existing pattern of extensive government–nonprofit cooperation. Against this background, a third section then looks more closely at the tools of action French governments are bringing to bear in their relations with nonprofits, the advantages and drawbacks of each, and the nonprofit role in the formulation of public policies. Finally, the article examines the key challenges in government–nonprofit cooperation in the provision of human services and the lessons the French experience might hold for Russia and other similar countries.

We examine Twitter data to assess the impact of media exposes on the reputations of two international nonprofits, Oxfam and Save the Children (STC). Using a random sample of 6794 Tweets, we study the daily gap between positive and negative sentiments expressed towards these organizations. The “unweighted gap” and the “weighted gap” (weighted by the number of followers) of the Twitter handle follow broadly the same trajectory with high fluctuation in response to new negative or positive media stories. Twitter handles with large audiences amplify variability in weighted gap. While Oxfam’s reputation did not fully recover to pre-Haiti levels even 6 months after the scandal, STC’s reputation returned to pre-scandal levels in 8 days, although it fluctuated in response to new revelations. Overall, reputation recovery for both organizations was aided when they received celebrity endorsements and focused public attention on their positive activities, especially by linking to visible global events.

This study addresses a major challenge the nonprofit sector is facing: low organizational commitment from employees. In response to the call to take into consideration contextual and institutional factors, it draws from the stakeholder theory and the organizational support theory to investigate how internal and external organizational processes could influence organizational commitment. The quantitative data collected from over 200 nonprofit employees revealed that organizational commitment was positively related to engaged leadership, community engagement effort, degree of formalization in daily operations, and perceived intangible support for employees. Further analysis showed that tangible support measured as perceived fair pay has an indirect effect, which is contingent upon how well the nonprofits engage with internal and external stakeholders. Findings suggest that nonprofit employees’ personal tangible gains may come second when assessing their commitment to the organization; instead, how well their employer manages stakeholder relationships in a larger community plays a more significant role.

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the characteristics and impact of different institutional environments in non-profit welfare provision in Denmark. Based on an analytical framework inspired by the policy fields approach (Stone and Sandfort 2009), the paper argues that to understand the non-profit sector, it is necessary to take a closer look at the differences and similarities not only across welfare fields, but also across non-profit providers and their public counterparts within the same field. Based on data from case studies on primary schools and nursing homes in two Danish municipalities, a number of explanatory factors are identified and analyzed: Regulative rules, funding issues, norms and expectations, and the degree of competition. Results show important differences in the institutional environment of the two welfare fields, and that these differences have an actual impact on outcomes: Both collaborative activities of welfare providers and organizational commitment among leaders, employees, and users are highly influenced by characteristics of the institutional environment. It is argued that the applied analytical framework can help understand and explain the large variations in non-profit welfare provision across fields, within countries.

Human resources are vital to an organization’s success and are a driving force behind innovation processes. This study examines the influence of various employee characteristics and their effect on the innovation culture with public and nonprofit organizations (innovation climate). Using data collected from 1220 public and nonprofit employees, we evaluate the role of various elements such as work motivation, job flexibility, and financial motivation, and how they affect an innovation culture within organizations. Findings from a series of OLS regressions suggest that job flexibility, the quality and reputation of the organization, and importance placed on work are positively related to both public and nonprofit innovation climates. Personnel inflexibility negatively affects the innovation climate in both the public and nonprofit sectors, and the effects of other variables, including advancement motivation, vary by sector.

This paper examines the extent to which communication strategies may influence willingness to volunteer. Research on persuasive advertising and the “arousal: cost-reward” model serve as theoretical foundations. The results of two experiments indicate that advertisement-induced (ad-induced) emotional arousal, message framing, and manipulations of self-efficacy perceptions can impact willingness to volunteer. Analysis detected a significant interaction between perceived self-efficacy and message framing. In the low (high) self-efficacy condition gain frames (loss frames) were more persuasive. When gender-related differences were considered, analysis revealed that ad-induced emotional arousal and manipulations of self-efficacy had their impact solely on men’s willingness to volunteer. Based on the results of the empirical analyses, implications for management and starting points for future research are presented.

The marketisation of social sector organisations or social marketisation emerged and spread around the world in the past three decades. In contrast with existing literature which claims that social marketisation makes social sector organisations reduce their efforts on advocacy and thus harms a civil society, this research argues that social marketisation is positively contributed to the influence of third sector organisations on government policies, and thus it strengthens civil society, rather than erodes it. Based on the National Survey of Charities and Social Enterprises in the UK, the results of regression analyses indicate clearly that, when other factors are equal, the two indicators of social marketisation, social entrepreneurship and achieving government contracts for purchasing services, are both statistically significant in estimating the level of policy influence of third sector organisations. The contribution of this research is that it finds a positive, instead of a negative, relationship between social marketisation and the perceived policy influence of third sector organisations.