Social enterprises (SEs) have an increasingly important role in developing more equitable societies worldwide. The capabilities of SEs are an important driver of their performance, but research in this area is still emerging, and the link between capabilities and performance has yet to be examined. By drawing on the dynamic capabilities perspective, it is suggested in this study that absorptive capacity—an organization’s ability to absorb, assimilate, and apply knowledge—affects a SE’s performance indirectly via its marketing capabilities. Using data from Hong Kong and Taiwanese social enterprises (n = 109), a set of hypotheses related to the capabilities–performance linkage were tested. The results show that the marketing capabilities of SEs mediated the relationship between absorptive capacity and financial performance. However, absorptive capacity was not associated with improved social performance via marketing capabilities. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the findings and directions for future research.

This study seeks to go beyond the current dichotomous evaluation of the effects of foreign financial patronage (and particularly European funds) in the post-communist civil society. A longitudinal claim-making and micro-frame analysis (1992–2012) of Czech Romani/pro-Romani activists shows that with the influx of European funds there was no significant change in NGOs action repertoire toward protest and contentious collective action as some proponents of the channeling thesis assume. On the other hand, the funding did not bring about the (often mentioned) co-optation and de-mobilization either. Particularly, Romani NGOs did not use protest tactics even before the arrival of foreign patronage, while other types of actors—especially in the informal, grassroots segment of civil society—protested both before and after this funding appeared. Nevertheless, what changed with the arrival of European funds was the discursive repertoire of the Romani and pro-Romani activists. The study concludes that the impacts of European funding also vary according to different civil society sectors and the picture of the impact of funding on post-communist society, in this case in the Czech Republic, is more diversified than previously assumed.

With limited studies on the relative effectiveness of different leadership styles in NPOs, the purpose of this paper is to propose a model in which work engagement mediates the effects of transformational leadership and transactional leadership simultaneously on affective commitment and organizational citizenship behavior among NPOs employees. Furthermore, the paper aims to investigate whether transformational leadership better explains work engagement and the aforesaid outcomes than transactional leadership. Relying on large scale data collected from employees working in two types of NPOs categories (human service organizations and charities) in the north of Italy, structural equation modeling was utilized to verify the aforesaid linkages. Among others, the indirect effect of transformational leadership on affective commitment and organizational citizenship behavior, through work engagement, was stronger than the indirect effect of transactional leadership. Implications, limitations, and future research are provided.

The relationship between social innovation venture and poor communities has received little attention from studies in the area of social innovation. In order to clarify this relationship, our study seeks to answer: What strategies would help to bring social innovation ventures closer to poor communities? We developed an empirical and qualitative research in a social innovation venture and two poor beneficiary communities in Brazil. The results indicate that the proximity between those agents was based on five main items: (a) reputation of the social venture; (b) appropriate prices according to the community’s reality; (c) close relations with the community; (d) structure proximity; and (e) winning the community leadership’s trust. Thus, our study contributes to the literature by exploring the beneficiary communities and their relationship with social innovation ventures. In addition, we suggest the use of the term “social innovation venture” to designate a wide range of types of organizations willing to generate social innovation in the practical field.

Some nonprofits easily attract resources, while others struggle to survive. However, little is known about what characteristics account for the difference in nonprofit organizations’ capacity to mobilize resources, especially in authoritarian countries. Using multilevel modeling techniques and a national sample of 3344 philanthropic foundations in 31 regions of mainland China, this research seeks to address this knowledge gap by examining the effect of both organizational and contextual factors on foundations’ revenues, paying special attention to the government’s role. Results show that the distribution of resources is highly unbalanced in China’s foundation sector and that foundations with particular characteristics are systematically favored. By exploring what factors give foundations the edge in mobilizing resources, this study reveals how the Chinese government has used a more sophisticated, indirect method than direct control to shape resource distribution and regulate the development of nonprofits. Social organizations can survive and even thrive, but only certain types.

Due to weak state and administrative capacity, the Russian government has involved resource-rich non-state actors into policy-making since about 2005 and established numerous institutionalized platforms, networks, and forums. These networks mainly emerge on regional and local levels and are designed to generate policy advice, implement decisions, and contribute to output legitimacy. A crucial question is how the authorities govern and regulate these bodies under the terms of a hybrid regime. The paper sheds light on why and how state authorities interact with non-state actors and unravels functions and flavors of governance networks in Russia. Drawing on the empirical results of case studies on anti-drug policy conducted in the regions Samara and St Petersburg, the paper reveals that state dominance within networks is a significant characteristic, although authorities rarely apply explicit ‘hard’ tools of government onto collaborations with non-state actors. The paper also allows for theorizing on the role of governance networks in a hybrid regime.

It has been shown that, in a context of economic crisis, cooperatives remain more resilient and flexible than other forms of entrepreneurship. The current study investigates the possible explanations for the varying dimension of cooperatives sector in different countries. To this end, focusing on the institutional environment, this work introduces a variable not commonly found in studies on entrepreneurial activity, political activism. We present an empirical analysis based on a structural equation model (SEM-PLS) applied to a database on 52 countries. The model leads us to draw the conclusion that there exists a direct and indirect relationship between political activism and the size of cooperative sector.

Nonprofit boards of directors are responsible for overseeing executive transitions, and the practitioner literature is rich with prescriptive guidance of how they should fulfill this vital responsibility. Nevertheless, we have limited evidence of what boards actually do as they navigate the space between an outgoing and an incoming executive, and moreover, we have no research that seeks to explain this critical juncture from a theoretical perspective. This exploratory study sought to fill this gap by applying theories commonly used in other literature about nonprofit governance in the context of an executive transition. Using a sample of twenty-nine US-based nonprofits that had recently experienced an executive transition, interviews were conducted and the resulting analysis is insightful about the approach boards took, the priorities they had, and their reflections on the transitions. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for both research and practice.

Civic engagement has long been understood as a transformative activity, conducive to the reformation of individual interests, beliefs, and preconceptions. Prior research suggests that such transformation occurs when individuals encounter and process novel and challenging experiences through the course of their work. Yet, as the literature on experiential learning shows, the lessons of such experiences are neither obvious nor self-evident. The challenges experienced through civic engagement do not necessarily lead individuals to change their perspectives on, or understandings of, the world. Rather, these experiences may serve to reify prior beliefs. This article seeks to explain how groups of civic participants collectively experience and interpret their civic encounters. It argues that collective sensemaking and the variety of alternative perspectives available within the group play an important role in determining whether novel information provokes inquiry and search for new understandings or if such information is assimilated into well-worn perspectives. I illustrate this argument through a case study of a mobile soup kitchen. I find that, even though volunteers regularly encounter potentially transformative experiences, their collective processing of these events helps to reinforce prior convictions rather than provoke new understandings.

This article examines how partnership between social organizations and popular protests is affected by the state in the field of environmental activism. Drawing upon content analysis and in-depth interviews, we study non-governmental organization (NGO) engagement with 22 grassroots environmental protests in China, 2007–2016. We find that NGOs and grassroots protesters were mostly distant from each other to avoid state repression and retribution, but NGOs occasionally collaborated with protesters in an ambivalent manner because state control was contradictory, fragmented, and varying. NGOs either used institutional means to support the protesters or were informally and invisibly involved in those protests. Our research contributes to studies of the triangular relationship between the state, NGOs, and social movements. Specifically, we find that when NGOs lack the institutional access to policy making but are not fully controlled by the state, they have both incentives and spaces to make joint actions with grassroots activists.

This paper looks at organizations working on issues of sex work/sex trafficking in Chicago as a strategic action field (SAF): a space where actors engage in collective action with a shared understanding of the field’s purposes, rules, and norms. Through analysis of SAFs, scholars focus on how actors intersect, manifesting in a context that simultaneously allows for reproducing the status quo, as well as producing social change. Using qualitative interviews with members of this particular SAF in Chicago, I demonstrate how actors in the field use the SAF concept of social skill to control the policy field. The challenger organization in particular uses social skill to exploit exogenous shocks to their advantage, pursuing legitimacy through their alignment with human service nonprofits. This paper concludes with a consideration of the use of SAF theory to dynamic fields such as sex work/sex trafficking, conceptualizing how field-level social change may occur.

Using data from a sample of 301 Australian disability nonprofit organizations (NPOs), this study applies configurational thinking to identify combinations of organizational capabilities that lead to Nonprofit Social Innovation (NSI)—a new service or process that promotes social inclusion of people with disabilities—and examines whether NSI is a sufficient condition for high societal impacts to be achieved. The conceptualization and components of the NSI framework were developed in our previous research through a two-month researcher-in-residency at disability NPOs. In this study, we employ fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to identify several “recipes” of capabilities (varying by organizational size and geographical location) for NSI development. The analyses find that high societal impacts from NSI occur when organizations adopt diverse perspectives, and embrace either person-focused approaches or operate in a risk-tolerant environment. These findings provide valuable linkages to managerial practice in nonprofits and advance emerging theoretical understandings of social innovation.

Social entrepreneurship research highlights the collaborative nature of social entrepreneurial efforts. Further, acknowledging the embeddedness of social ventures in the wider socio-economic and cultural context, the literature stresses the need to move our analysis from the micro-level of intra-organisational practices to the meso-level of inter-organisational dynamics. To answer to these calls, the article engages Fligstein’s and McAdam’s theory of strategic action fields (SAF) to investigate the dynamics of the inter-organisational collaborative work of social ventures. Empirical material comes from the efforts of a social venture to scale up to a new city through developing a cross-sectoral collaboration with the city administration. Findings indicate the risk of mission drift that weaker partners in SAFs run when collaborating with incumbent actors. In this doing, the study illustrates how a meso-level analysis can further our understanding of social entrepreneurial ventures in particular, and cross-sectoral partnerships in general.

The overall performance of cooperatives is related to economic–financial results and actions focused on benefits for their members. This study aims to examine the comparative performance of agro-industrial cooperatives considering the economic–financial and socioeconomic dimensions, the latter defined as performance regarding the fulfillment of economic relations with cooperative members. A sample of 25 agricultural cooperatives in the Brazilian Region of Paraná was used, involving a total of 120,000 cooperative members and 54,000 employees in 2014. Economic–financial performance was assessed by traditional indicators. To assess socioeconomic performance, the indicators were defined through experts’ perceptions of what characterizes good performance by a cooperative vis-à-vis the dual function of this type of organization: a society of people strengthening their activities, and marketing objectives strengthening the institution. The results achieved through a multi-criteria analysis and a correlation test indicated that, comparatively, cooperatives with better economic–financial performance did not necessarily achieve a superior socioeconomic performance.

This paper draws upon accountability and legitimacy theories to explore for what social enterprises are accountable, how they communicate accountability, and to what extent they publicly communicate accountability. Case study methodology was employed, examining four work-integrated social enterprises in Australia. Data collection involved interviews with managers of each social enterprise, and a review of various secondary data including social enterprise websites and internal and external reports. Findings reveal a temporal dimension of accountability, as social enterprises acknowledged their dual social and financial accountability, but prioritised financial over social performance. Communication of social performance was limited, with publicly available reports partial and selective in nature. Communication of financial performance was even more limited, reporting typically directed to internal stakeholders. Implications include the need for social enterprises to communicate social and financial performance more broadly, in order to advance their legitimacy from moral (based on intentions) to consequential (based on achievements).

This study investigates the extent to which newspapers are polarized in representing civil society organizations in Turkey. In examining the news in 15 printed newspapers and 2 online newspapers in 2017, we found that (1) 1499 associations and 499 foundations were mentioned but not equally distributed across the newspapers, (2) Turkish newspapers’ coverage of associations/foundations was affected by the type of association/foundation (religious/conservative vs. secular) and newspaper (pro-government vs. anti-government), (3) when news about an association/foundation appeared in pro-government newspapers, it did not appear in anti-government newspapers, and vice versa, and (4) secular associations/foundations were covered more often by anti-government newspapers than by pro-government newspapers. We therefore argue that in countries such as Turkey, where civil society organizations have historically been closely allied with state or political ideologies, newspapers’ political stances affect the media coverage of civil society organizations.

The paper aims to develop a better understanding of the evolution and structuration of contemporary civil society fields. It applies analytical elements from field theories and closely related network governance literature within a qualitative research design to explore collective action around community-led housing (CLH) in England, a label assigned to a range of alternative housing models. We argue that collective action needs to be understood as a loose coupling of earlier and younger social movements, based on their shared awareness of and willingness to address macro-level societal problems. We further identify a gradual evolution of field governance from loose covenanting between sub-fields, development of a common project, to network activation to manage significant external funding. This process has not yet led to a unified field with stable internal governance and wide external legitimacy on the national level. However, an embryonic field structure and permeable boundaries provide CLH actors multiple hybrid identities and strategic positioning opportunities in adjacent fields. We believe that our strategic field perspective can shed light on the nature of collective action in other parts of the civil society.

We examine the implementation of governance arrangements to extend ownership and control to employees and community stakeholders in social enterprises. Evidence from a sample of newly created public service social enterprises in England shows how the realisation of democratic ideals involves a gradual and often challenging process. Different outcomes are explained in terms of an interplay between the legal forms and representational mechanisms adopted and the enabling role of organisational culture. The paper contributes an analytic framework that captures the range of possible outcomes in terms of stakeholder versus stewardship forms of representation, and the cultural–psychological dimension of ownership. Organisations may find themselves at different stages in the journey towards the realisation of democratic ownership and governance. Conclusions are drawn for the field of social enterprise and non-profit research.