With limited studies on antecedents and consequences of work engagement with special reference to NGOs, two novel antecedents of work engagement, namely workload (job demand) and proactive personality (job resource) are introduced in the study. By drawing on the revised JD-R model, the study empirically examines the indirect effects of job demands, job resources, personal resources, and ideological resources on organizational outcomes, i.e. intention to quit and organizational citizenship behaviour through work engagement in NGOs. The data collected from paid employees of registered NGOs operating in India were analysed using structural equation modelling. The study reveals that workload does not decrease employees' work engagement in NGOs. Whereas employment insecurity was negatively associated with work engagement. Besides, transformational leadership, intrinsic rewards, community service self-efficacy, proactive personality, and public service motivation played a vital role in fostering work engagement in NGOs. Furthermore, work engagement was negatively associated with the intention to quit and positively associated with organizational citizenship behaviour.

Based on grounded theory, the present study summarizes the transcripts from 32 in-depth interviews with Chinese community emergency volunteers to uncover the attributions of community emergency volunteering in China during the COVID-19 pandemic. Community emergency volunteering in China is affected by four main factors: inner awareness, the external environment, national policy, and publicity and advocacy. Among these factors, inner awareness and the external environment are the internal and social psychological attributions, respectively, of emergency volunteering. In addition, publicity and advocacy also play a role in both inner awareness and the external environment and, together with national policies, act on community emergency volunteering. Finally, the high level of trust of some volunteers in their ruling party and government is a deep-seated driving force of their volunteering, a factor that has not been emphasized in past studies.

Increased electronic filing, or e-filing, of nonprofit data in the United States and abroad quickens public availability, eliminates dependence on third-party proprietary datasets, and broadens access to information offering insight into previously neglected topics. On the other hand, increasingly open data require researchers to independently ensure data quality, understand limitations, and consider how data availability shapes research questions. As electronic filing becomes mandatory in the United States and more widespread elsewhere, this research considers how expanded e-filer data impact nonprofit research approaches and opportunities while assessing the generalizability and limits of existing e-filed data in the United States. While the data suggest increasing compliance with e-filing, analyses show that older nonprofits with greater capacity and sophisticated financial characteristics are historically more likely to e-file. Further, particular subsectors are more likely to e-file than others. Therefore, using existing e-filed IRS Form 990s for panel data analysis presents some generalizability concerns, although this will improve over time. Moving forward, e-filing and machine-readable access requirements bode well for both quantitative and qualitative nonprofit research, while the United States’ experience provides helpful lessons for other research settings.

This article proposes a new typology between professional and voluntary care, thus seeking to understand why attempts to establish clear boundaries between them often end in ambiguity and frustration. We argue that because both forms of care represent their own unique and paradoxical ways of combining formal and relational care principles, any attempt to fix the boundaries between them and create the sense of a predictable world usually proves challenging. As such, we show that the two different care practices, in fact, have severe difficulties drawing their boundaries on their own terms. Finally, we consider how these insights might enhance efforts to manage collaborations between professional and voluntary care delivery.

The past two decades have witnessed massive growth in the amount of quantitative research in nonprofit studies. Despite the large number of studies, findings from these studies have not always been consistent and cumulative. The diverse and competing findings constitute a barrier to offering clear, coherent knowledge for both research and practice. To further advance nonprofit studies, some have called for meta-analysis to synthesize inconsistent findings. Although meta-analysis has been increasingly used in nonprofit studies in the past decade, many researchers are still not familiar with the method. This article thus introduces meta-analysis to nonprofit scholars and, through an example demonstration, provides general guidelines for nonprofit scholars with background in statistical methods to conduct meta-analyses, with a focus on various judgement calls throughout the research process. This article could help nonprofit scholars who are interested in using meta-analysis to address some unsolved research questions in the nonprofit literature.

Solidarity is a fundamental concept in social sciences, explaining the motivation for collective action and understanding how social cohesion institutions are structured. Its conceptualization, however, is often taken for granted in solidarity economy literature. This article investigates its emergence in solidarity economy organizations and the transformation through practices and discourse in public policies. We conducted a qualitative single-case study of COOPERCENTRAL VR, a family farming cooperative center with 13 organizations in Brazil. In conclusion, we demonstrate the paths of solidarity in the construction of a new socioeconomic reality and the role of the relationship between civil society and governments in forming and maintaining this process. The organization is indicated as an essential factor in bonding subjects and society.

This study examines the antecedents of political trust and its association with the likelihood of charitable giving in China using the path analysis model. The results show that morality and competence matter for political trust. Unlike most existing studies that separately test the impact of political trust and general social trust on charitable giving, this research pays attention to the significant association between political trust and general social trust in the Chinese state-centered environment and explores the role of general social trust in bridging political trust and charitable giving. Using a nationally representative sample, this research finds that political trust indirectly shapes charitable giving through the effect of general social trust in China. Individuals with a higher level of political trust also show more trust in society and have a higher probability of donating.

While volunteering is an essential factor in service delivery in many societal areas, the inclusion of volunteers in formal settings can also lead to tensions. In this article, we combine the literature on volunteering and inter-professional collaboration (IPC) to elaborate a framework regarding remedies for tensions between professional staff and volunteers within IPC in health care provision to ensure successful collaboration. Using a dyadic survey design to interview volunteers and volunteer managers, we show that the perspectives of volunteers and volunteer managers on the antecedents of effective IPC differ in paradoxical ways. While volunteer managers apply organizational logic concerning tasks and processes to avoid tensions, volunteers seek solutions on a relational basis. However, rather than trying to resolve these paradoxes, our study indicates that carefully managing tensions arising between volunteers and professional staff may be more successful than trying to resolve all tensions.

National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities (NTEE) codes have become the primary classifier of nonprofit missions since they were developed in the mid-1980s in response to growing demands for a taxonomy of nonprofit activities (Herman in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 19(3):293–306, 1990, Barman in Social Science History 37:103–141, 2013). However, the increasingly complex nature of nonprofits means that NTEE codes may be outdated or lack specificity. As an alternative, scholars and practitioners can create a bespoke taxonomy for a specific purpose by hand-coding a training dataset and using machine learning classifiers to apply the codes to a large population. This paper presents a framework for determining training set sizes needed to scale custom taxonomies using machine learning algorithms.

Immigrant volunteering is a disputed topic. For some scholars, an important instrument for the social integration of immigrants, while others frame immigrant volunteerism as a regime of 'ethical citizenship' centred around the paradigms of 'civic integration' and 'deservingness'. Our research collected the experiences of hundreds of migrant volunteers in Italy (658 questionnaires plus 89 in-depth interviews) to address three research questions in particular: immigrant volunteers' levels of social inclusion, their reasons for volunteering, and the links between volunteering and other forms of social and political participation. Our findings show that volunteering is more dependent on social integration than on social marginality, represents a way to achieve a higher level of social integration, and can be framed as a way to perform active citizenship and anti-xenophobic claims. In particular, volunteering allows immigrant to present themselves as active subjects, oppose demeaning stereotypes, and express political commitment. Ultimately, this substantiates a form of citizenship ‘from below’ that re-writes the script of citizenship and enriches it with new ideas of entitlements and belongings.

While nonprofit organizations have traditionally been considered increasingly competing for resources, this paper mainly explores the potential mutual relationship between volunteering in sport and volunteering in culture. Drawing on 2014 data from the German Volunteer Survey, we estimated a bivariate probit model based on 27,293 observations. The findings suggested that sports and cultural volunteering were complementary activities. Thus, promoting volunteering in one of the domains positively affected volunteering in the alternative domain. Parental volunteering, religiosity, and education were primary drivers of both types of volunteering. However, differences in some determinants have also been found. For example, volunteering in culture was predominantly female, while male volunteers dominated sports.

This study develops a new text-as-data method for organization identification, based on word embedding. We introduce and apply the method to identify identity-based nonprofit organizations, using the U.S. nonprofits’ mission and activity information reported in the IRS Form 990s in 2010–2016. Our results show that such method is simple but versatile. It complements the existing dictionary-based approaches and supervised machine learning methods for classification purposes and generates a reliable continuous measure of document-to-keyword relevance. Our approach provides a nonbinary alternative for nonprofit big data analyses. Using word embedding, researchers are able to identify organizations of interest, track possible changes over time and capture nonprofits’ multi-dimensionality.

This paper contributes to our understanding of volunteer management by charting some important challenges associated with the governance of one of the UK’s largest timebanking networks. While timebanking is often treated as a form of volunteering, many timebank advocates are keen to distinguish it sharply from traditional volunteering. We suggest that this tension generates a fundamental ‘performance paradox’ in the management of timebanks in the voluntary sector. We draw on political discourse theory to characterise and evaluate associated challenges, suggesting that, when viewed against a host of context-specific organisational and policy pressures, the progressive potential of timebanking cannot be realised as a distinct community economy without adequate support. Instead of taking up a position alongside more traditional forms of volunteering, timebanking is more likely to be subsumed by them.

Pro-refugee philanthropy is beneficial for refugee integration and an important contributor to intergroup relations in a South African context. No study, however, has provided an in-depth quantitative analysis of what factors drive this type of behaviour. This article investigates what cultural, social and religious factors may predict participation in charitable behaviour towards refugees in South Africa. Three types of behaviours were examined: (i) material donations; (ii) volunteer activities; and (iii) information sharing. Using data from a 2019 Ipsos Migration Survey, the study found that intergroup threat was a robust predictor of charitable behaviour of all kinds. Friendship contact with a pro-refugee volunteer was also positively associated with philanthropic behaviour. Institutional trust and religious orientation were correlated with volunteer activities and information sharing but not donations. Study findings can be utilised to design interventions that increase public participation in actions that help refugees in an African context.

The conceptual malleability of the notion of social innovation has resulted in the appropriation of the concept in various sectors. The goal of the paper is to provide a critical view of such appropriation. We contend that this appropriation often includes the usage of the concept to advance agendas away from or opposed to that of the common good. This paper evaluates such problematic usage by identifying the distinguishing and core aspects of social innovation. These include the social need-meeting dimension geared towards marginalised or disadvantaged communities which is enacted via processes of social and/or power relations shifts of these groups. The paper locates the current trajectory of social innovation discourse to identify that it is in the actions of grassroots third sector initiatives, where the democratic side of social innovation is conserved, and calls for its advancement to prevent exploitation of disadvantaged communities and hogging of resources away from initiatives that are committed to it.

In Latin America, it is recognised that social movements have a relevant role in changing social policies on abortion and marriage; however, little is known about the operating conditions accounting for the causal implication. Resorting to a qualitative comparative analysis of 24 Mexican policies, this research explores the conditions taken from moral policy literature. Drawing on extensive data, it argues three causal patterns, where influential movements are a necessary but no sufficient, (1) influential movements require a context full of “legal opportunities”—favourable legal precedents and Court intervention; (2) if they only find favourable legal precedents, conservative actors influence must be scarce, and (3) in cases where the Congress is conservative, the Court intervention, and the minimum conservative influence are required for movements to achieve legal changes on abortion and marriage. The novelty of this article consists of a new model that explains the conditions that play a relevant role in analysing abortion and equal marriage policy changes; in addition, valuable inputs are included for the benefit of the interested parties.

The knowledge produced about the third sector in one country can provide useful insights to understand the nonprofit sector in other countries. It goes without saying “Knowledge not shared is knowledge wasted.” While the volume of research on the South Korean third sector has been growing in recent decades, its readership has been mostly limited to Korean language users, missing the opportunity to globalize knowledge. Recognizing an opportunity to spark conversations about how to share the third sector research done in one country with global readers, we conducted semantic network analysis to identify long-term patterns of research in South Korean third sector knowledge production, reviewing about 6500 nonprofit studies published between 1987 and 2019. With a bigram and trend analysis of key themes, we find key characteristics and discuss them in detail. This study contributes to the literature by highlighting the benefits of sharing knowledge produced in one country with scholars and practitioners in other countries.

While compulsory volunteering activities have been included in education programs in many countries, it is still unknown how compulsory volunteers’ personal characteristics are related to their motivation and future volunteering behavior. Thus, this study aimed to investigate the relationships among two personality traits (extraversion, agreeableness), seven factors of volunteer motivation, and intention to continue volunteering in the context of compulsory volunteering. A total of 605 compulsory volunteers for sports events in Singapore provided responses to a survey. Findings showed that the two personality traits were predictors of six motivation factors, including expression of value, community involvement, interpersonal contacts, career orientation, personal growth, and love of sport. In addition, expression of value, community involvement, personal growth, and love of sports positively predicted continuance intention, while extrinsic rewards negatively predicted continuance intention. These findings extend to the existing literature and suggest the importance for volunteer organizations to tailor both the recruitment process and the volunteering experience to promote volunteer motivation and continuance intention.

This paper investigates how community racial composition affects types of organizations people of color volunteer for. Specifically, we explore which type of nonprofits (religious and secular, and club-type and collective-type) people of color (Blacks and Hispanics) are likely to volunteer for as the percentages of their racial in-groups in the community increase. Using the current population survey volunteering supplements and county-level census data from 2002 to 2014, we find that community racial composition does matter for people of color’ decisions regarding where they choose to volunteer, particularly for Hispanics. As the percentage of Hispanics in the county increases, Hispanics start to volunteer more for collective-type organizations, moving beyond volunteering for religious organizations. The findings from this study suggest the importance of efforts to engage diverse groups of population in the civic sphere, especially people of color who might have not been welcomed to various forms of community engagement. Such endeavors will contribute to making and sustaining a healthy democracy.

Philanthropy seeks to address deep-rooted social issues and assume responsibility for the creation of public goods not provided by the public sector—and in this way help reduce inequality. Yet philanthropy has also been criticized for bypassing democratic mechanisms for the public determination of how to invest in society—and thus may perpetuate other inequities. In both cases, inequality, defined as asymmetries of resources and power, plays a critical role in public goods creation and in the legitimacy of a country’s philanthropic ecosystem. However, little empirical research examines the existence and role of inequality in country-level donation systems. To fill this gap, this study provides evidence of growing donation concentration in Chile’s philanthropic ecosystem, with a focus on the culture sector, characterizes it by mapping systematic differences in ecosystem perceptions by actor type, and identifies and tests statistically structural and organizational factors associated with these perceptions. Inequality in Chile’s donation system operates at multiple geographical, legal, and organizational levels, all of which are reflected in objective donation amounts and subjective ecosystem perceptions. We conclude that in Chile resource asymmetries and power imbalances hinder the fulfillment of philanthropy’s promise and call for further research to identify policies that address inequities in emerging philanthropic ecosystems in Chile, Latin America, and beyond.