This paper investigates how volunteer managers from Roskilde Festival experience, enact, and respond to organisational paradoxes and how these paradoxes are both formed by, and sustain, the organisational context of the festival. The festival is a professional world-class event with high standards of performance, while being primarily volunteer-driven. This constitutes a context of “professional volunteerism”, which serves as a locus of interwoven paradoxical tensions. Paradox is often portrayed as a pair of poles that are connected, but in opposition, this paper illustrates how different paradoxes and the responses to them can be interwoven, thereby describing a more complex understanding of paradox.

How can computational social science (CSS) methods be applied in nonprofit and philanthropic studies? This paper summarizes and explains a range of relevant CSS methods from a research design perspective and highlights key applications in our field. We define CSS as a set of computationally intensive empirical methods for data management, concept representation, data analysis, and visualization. What makes the computational methods “social” is that the purpose of using these methods is to serve quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods social science research, such that theorization can have a solid ground. We illustrate the promise of CSS in our field by using it to construct the largest and most comprehensive database of scholarly references in our field, the Knowledge Infrastructure of Nonprofit and Philanthropic Studies (KINPS). Furthermore, we show that through the application of CSS in constructing and analyzing KINPS, we can better understand and facilitate the intellectual growth of our field. We conclude the article with cautions for using CSS and suggestions for future studies implementing CSS and KINPS.

Although there is substantial literature demonstrating evidence of a positive association between volunteerism and well-being, this relationship is under-explored among specific types of volunteerism, including in child welfare roles. This cross-sectional quantitative study used a sample of 302 volunteers in the role of “Host Families” from Safe Families for Children to explore whether six dimensions of well-being are associated with volunteering in child welfare or any specific type of motivation. Results demonstrate mixed evidence of significant associations between volunteering, well-being, and motivation. However, the results show there is no apparent decrease in the well-being of the child welfare volunteers. Rather, they are healthy, happy, and satisfied with life despite the cultural belief that child welfare work is distressing. Additionally, this study offers reliable options for operationalizing well-being and motivation. This may promote improved opportunities for accurate comparisons between future studies investigating volunteerism.

Geographic space or location is an important aspect of many research topics in the third sector. Methodological advances have made it possible for scholars to better identify, assess, and account for the spatial aspects of their data. Such advances include Geographic Information System descriptive mapping of items such as density and location, Explorative Spatial Data Analysis, and Spatial Regression Analysis. This paper reviews a range of third-sector research questions that can be addressed with spatial analysis. We then briefly summarize social science and nonprofit scholarship as they relate to spatial analysis. We conclude by describing an exploratory spatial statistic as well as a spatial regression that can be used to illustrate the usefulness of these techniques.

In past decades, hybrid organizations and institutional complexity have received growing attention, yet questions remain about how hybrids manage institutional complexity in the Nordic welfare states. This article investigates how Norwegian social enterprises (SEs), a subset of hybrid organizations, internally manage contradictory demands when externally engaging with multiple logics. The data consists of interviews of leaders and staff members from five SEs, and the findings show that most institutional referents hold a public-sector logic which may crowd out the hybrid nature of SEs. Depending on the conflicting demands, SEs mix decoupling and selective coupling when responding to them. Some were also found to rely on the structural responses of organizational compartmentalization. Compared to the blended hybrids, the structural hybrids experience less internal tension when managing institutional complexity since logic compartmentalization allows the organizations to attend both to their in-use logic and at-play demands. The data yield compelling insights into how the Nordic welfare state may incite a specific configuration of SE where logic compartmentalization appears as a pragmatic choice.

Volunteer satisfaction is a significant concern, as volunteers have lower barriers to exit than employees and tend to leave nonprofits when dissatisfied. While volunteer management predominantly focuses on the implementation of management practices, this study alters that perspective. Through job crafting, one form of proactive behavior in organizational contexts, we study volunteers as active participants in their volunteer experience. We posit that volunteer job crafting is an important, yet overlooked, factor in volunteer outcomes such as satisfaction and organizational identification. We test and (partially) confirm our hypotheses using a sample of 678 volunteers in one youth-serving nonprofit organization in the Midwest region of the USA. This study extends job crafting research further into the non-work domain by adding a multifaceted conceptualization of job crafting in the context of volunteer work. We distinguish between behavioral and cognitive crafting and provide empirical support on how those crafting forms relate to volunteer satisfaction and organizational identification.

Professional asylum seeker-related NGOs (non-governmental organizations) have been visible actors in Turkey, which is one of the most affected countries by forced migration in the world since 2011 when the Syrian civil war erupted. As a result, numerous studies and projects have been undertaken to explore the positions of these NGOs in terms of their effect on integration; yet the difficulties faced by NGO workers in Turkey have remained understudied. This qualitative study aims to close this gap by exploring the challenges that NGO workers face at an individual level. In this regard, data were gathered through semi-structured interviews from 33 staff in asylum seeker-related NGOs which adopt a right-based perspective. According to data, asylum seeker-related NGO workers experience significant problems stemming from both external and internal difficulties.

This paper explores the paradoxical nature of volunteering by examining how volunteers navigate the market/mission paradox in their everyday practices. It mobilizes a communicative framework to study organizational oppositions. The paper contributes to the literature on the paradoxical nature of volunteering by proposing six discursive navigation strategies and a processual model for navigating oppositions in interaction. The findings highlight the importance of an organizing and pragmatic oriented discourse that acts as a dispatcher between opposed discourses, as well as “both-and” and “more than” approaches that create middle ground for negotiation. In addition, it shows the importance of balancing market and mission by looking for compromise.

This paper explores Twitter adoption and social media engagement of private German environmental foundations. The study follows Lovejoy and Saxton’s (2012) approach to the hierarchy of social media engagement. It demonstrates the domination of an information provision role on Twitter and the almost equal relevance of action mobilizations and community building posts. At the same time, the study supplements the existing typology with the additional dimension of communication partners addressed in each type of tweet. Finally, using data from interviews, the study interprets and explains the role of social media tweets and patterns of engagement with different groups. In-depth analysis of tweets and interviews with the foundation representatives confirmed a limited use of social media as a means for dialogue and community development. Simultaneously, analysis shows that tweets posted by foundations predominantly address a professional community of other civil society actors, experts and politicians, creating an online expert bubble. Interviews confirmed that such online connections mirror offline cooperation networks that are perceived to be more important for successful communication and project development by the investigated organizations.

Institutions—defined as strategies, norms and rules (Ostrom Understanding institutional diversity, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2005)—are omnipresent in third sector contexts. In this paper, we present the Institutional Grammar (IG) as a theoretically informed approach to support institutional analysis in third sector research. More specifically, the IG coding syntax allows the researcher to systematically wade through rich text and (transcribed) spoken language to identify and dissect institutional statements into finer syntactical segments of interest to the researcher. It is a versatile method that can generate data for small- or large-N research projects and can be integrated with mixed-method research designs. After first introducing and describing the IG, we present a case study to illustrate how a IG-based syntactic analysis can be leveraged to inform third sector research. In the case, we ask: Do the rules embedded in regulatory text addressing the involuntary dissolution of charity organizations differ between bifurcated and unitary jurisdictions in the United States? Using IG’s ABDICO 2.0 syntax, we identify eleven “Activation Condition” (AC) categories that trigger action and assess variation among the 46 jurisdictions. We ultimately conclude that the rules do not differ between bifurcated and unitary jurisdictions, but that finding is not the primary concern. The case demonstrates IG as an important methodological advance that yields granular, structured analyses of rules, norms and strategies in third sector settings that may be difficult to identify with other methods. We then emphasize four areas of third sector research that could benefit from the addition of IG-based methods: analysis of (1) rule compliance, (2) inter-organizational collaboration, (3) comparative study of institutional design, and (4) the study of institutional change. We close the paper with some reflections on where IG-based analysis is headed.

How do nonstate organizations carry out their programs in political contexts hostile to civil society activity? This paper examines the case of refugee-supporting organizations in Turkey, which hosts over 3.6 million Syrians under a temporary protection regime. While the Turkish state has taken a central role in refugee reception, nonstate organizations have played a sizeable role in refugee support. Analyzing interviews with key personnel across 23 organizations in Istanbul, the paper finds that organizational capacity and organizational identity together explain variations in CSO-state relations. While high-capacity organizations that adopt a variety of “rights-based” and “needs-based” identities will cooperate with state institutions, lower-capacity organizations use comparable signifiers to justify selective engagement or avoidance of state institutions. The paper argues that analyzing how organizations negotiate their identities can help explain variations in CSO-state relations in restrictive contexts without relying on a priori assumptions about CSO alignment with or opposition to the state.

Extreme right-wing violence has resulted in an intense academic debate on how democratic actors can respond to movement on the extreme right. This article explores how various types of CSOs perceive their role, interest, and willingness when it comes to counteracting right-wing extremism. Building on a theoretical framework that makes visible a variety of CSO responses and differences between types of CSOs, the results show that CSOs view themselves as having a watchdog role in relation to right-wing extremism. However, CSOs place the principal responsibility of response to right-wing extremism outside organized civil society in the hands of politicians, citizens, and the media. In addition, not all CSOs are willing to respond in the same way or to the same extent. Humanitarian and social service organizations are more inclined to engage in dialogue and protest compared with sports and recreation organizations and culture organizations. The article concludes by discussing the notion that bridging organizations may be more willing to respond to right-wing extremism and to use dialogue and deliberation compared to bonding organizations.

At the time of introducing legally required disclosure of financial statements (FS) among Belgian nonprofit organizations (NPOs) in 2006, NPOs are found to increase their share of long-term and financial credit in total credit, relative to a control group of for-profits with unchanged disclosure requirements. Regarding FS format, NPOs filing the complete, audited FS format were able to increase their share of long-term and financial credit in the post-disclosure period, relative to a control group of NPOs filing the abbreviated, unaudited format. Rather than impacting total credit financing, expanded FS disclosure regulation seems to cause a shift in debt structure toward greater long-term and financial credit. This may increase NPOs’ financial stability and may alleviate their financing constraints. The results support the relevance of FS disclosure in the nonprofit sector.

This qualitative research study examines how volunteering and nonvolunteering is associated with immigrant perceptions of their integration into US society. The study analyzes 24 semi-structured interviews to explore differences in social integration experiences and perceptions of social integration between immigrant volunteers and nonvolunteers. The study’s theoretical framework is intersectionality, and the conceptual framework consists of social integration, rational choice, and symbolic boundary theory. While past studies assert that volunteering increases feelings of social integration, this empirical study offers a comparative perspective between immigrants who volunteer and those who do not. Study findings suggest that formal immigrant volunteers build a stronger sense of agency in their social integration journeys through their contributions to American society. Data suggest that most nonvolunteering participants achieve minor benefits by engaging in informal volunteering outside of organizational auspices.

While numerous studies have shown that individual donors respond more generously to identifiable victims than to statistically equivalent victims, the impact of the identifiable victim effect (IVE) on collective donations remains unknown. This article addresses this research gap by proposing an explanatory framework that incorporates both rational and irrational perspectives. Two between-subject experiments were conducted to determine the effect and mechanism of IVE on collective donation behavior. A total of 610 participants with prior donation behavior were recruited. ANOVA and multiple regression analysis are used to examine the main effect, as well as the mediation and moderated effects. The results suggest that in Chinese charitable contexts, an identifiable victim effect leads to significantly stronger intentions for collective donation actions, as it increases both donors’ emotional reactions and perceived responsibility. In addition, the fundraising method moderates the impact of IVE on collective donations. Several significant implications for NPO practitioners are discussed.

A growing number of people around the world identify, in some way, as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ+); yet, these voices are noticeably absent from nonprofit research. To address issues of equity and the historic marginalization of LGBTQ+ people both societally and in the nonprofit sector, this manuscript seeks to answer the following questions: Why is it important to include sexual orientation and gender identity and expression (SOGIE) survey questions in nonprofit surveys? What are best practices for including SOGIE survey questions in nonprofit research? We present LGBTQ+ inclusive research strategies and suggested questions for inclusive SOGIE survey design. Though this article focuses primarily on surveying LGBTQ+ populations, it can also be instructive for general population surveys.

Social innovation (SI) solves social problems. What features distinguish NGOs that are experienced in implementing SI? This article employs a survey of a representative sample of 400 rural NGOs from Poland to highlight certain features that distinguish NGOs with experience implementing SI among the following: (1) cooperation with other organisations and public institutions; (2) the involvement of rural inhabitants in activities intended to solve their social problems; and (3) human and financial resources. NGOs implementing SI are distinguished by features (1) and (3). The results are interpreted in the context of rural NGO activities in the postcommunist countries of Central and Eastern Europe.

Informed by self-determination theory (SDT), this study explores older adults’ long-term community volunteering experiences and motivations in Shanghai. We took a qualitative research approach to conduct face-to-face, semi-structured, in-depth interviews with older adults who were long-term volunteers in Shanghai communities (N = 69). We performed thematic analysis and generated themes for their experiences and evolving motivations. Participants began volunteering because it was enjoyable and helped them adapt to life after retirement. As their volunteering progressed, participants’ motivations gradually evolved and they developed a fusion motivation––juewu, combining characteristics of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations––for their strong commitment to volunteering. Gradually, participants assimilated juewu into their volunteer identity, which encouraged them to lead community self-governance initiatives. This study sheds light on the evolving, nuanced, underlying motivational process that shapes older adults’ experiences of long-term community volunteering.

The concept of ‘open social innovation’ (OSI) has not yet been fully understood, particularly in relation to social enterprises (SEs). This paper explores the use of OSI as a means of achieving social change through two in-depth, longitudinal, qualitative case studies with Scottish SEs. The researcher undertook participant observation for a year as well as conducting interviews and reviewing documents of the case study organizations. We build on Wikhamn (2013) by conceptualizing two approaches to OSI: ‘controlled’ which is closely connected to market-based attitudes, and ‘libre’ which is connected to the knowledge commons. Each approach has ramifications for how SEs achieve social change: either through exploitation of intellectual property as a means of income generation or freely revealing to accelerate social impact. The ways in which SEs manage OSI could thus determine the impact they can have on tackling some of society’s most challenging social problems.

International donors frequently seek to transition local NGOs to national government funding during aid reduction. The outcomes of this transition vary widely between contexts. Scholarship on aid reduction has yet to explain this variation, and some donor policies for facilitating transition lack a firm basis in research. In this article, we use NGO–government relations theory to analyze case study data from the HIV/AIDS sector in Thailand. We find that NGO–government relations theory provides a convincing explanation for the outcomes of the sector’s transition. The theory indicates that for transition to be successful, the NGO–government relationship must shift from a supplementary one, marked by outside funding for NGOs, guarded attitudes, and more restrictive government oversight, to a complementary relationship marked by government funding, collaborative attitudes, and regulations that facilitate NGO activities. This shift in Thailand has been largely successful but is incomplete. The findings suggest that donors should pay attention to the underlying attitudes of NGOs and government, in addition to laws and bureaucratic procedures. The research identifies several current donor programs with the potential to facilitate attitude change and one that may be counterproductive.