This paper investigates what kinds of social networks nudge volunteering by applying social network analysis. Unique Japanese data with various social network variables are used to explore the association between formal and informal social networks and volunteering. The results show that “attending meetings of neighborhood associations” and “enrollment in a membership association,” which involve forms of formal social networks, are positively correlated with the probability of both “any volunteering” and five kinds of volunteering. “Frequency of meals with friends,” an indicator of informal social networks, has statistical significance for volunteering. Notably, friendships, even if meals are infrequent, are enough to lead to volunteering opportunities. The author thus concludes that greater social participation can be fostered by promoting not only organizational assistance but also friendships.

Female labor migration for livelihood is becoming a common phenomenon in migrant-sending countries. Although female workers migrate with a temporary contract for a better livelihood, they are experienced with various exploitations and difficulties while working abroad. Therefore, many female migrants returned to the country from the Middle East, and they faced enormous challenges in reintegration. Thus, this paper critically reviews the role of migration-related NGOs in the reintegration of returned female migrants in Bangladesh. It also explores the critical limitations of the NGO’s approach to this reintegration. The paper is qualitative research that includes primary and secondary data. Primary data were collected through face-to-face in-depth interviews with 27 participants. The paper also employs secondary data from articles, books, and reports of migration-focused NGOs. Based on the findings from data, the paper argues that the migration-focused NGOs in Bangladesh positively impact the reintegration of Bangladeshi returned female migrants by providing economic assistance, social, psychological, and legal support to returned women, entrepreneurship training, social mobilization strategies, and grassroots-level activities. The data also show that the migration-focused NGOs in Bangladesh face challenges in the reintegration of many returned women due to the NGOs’ aid dependency, a lack of comprehensive actions, shortage of funds, required resources, lack of coordination, socioeconomic structure, stigma, and religious issues. Finally, the paper includes some policy suggestions that would be helpful for the NGO’s approach to reintegrating returned women migrants.

While a rich literature investigates how and why NPOs use social media, research on why they differ in their social media adoption (SMA) is limited. In this paper we examine how NPOs’ interorganizational partner portfolio characteristics can enable or constrain their adoption of social media, including blogs and videos, conventional social media (Facebook, Twitter…) and crowd-based platforms (crowdfunding and petitions). Based on a survey distributed to a sample of environmental NPOs in France, results indicate that NPOs having open networks, whose partners are physically distant, and that have more cross-sectoral partners have higher SMA. Network portfolio management can thus make up for a shortage of financial resources to invest in social media.

Compared to the extensive literature on the outcomes of revenue diversification in nonprofit organizations, less research has focused on its antecedents. This study investigates the environmental and organizational factors influencing the extent to which nonprofits diversify their revenue sources. Using a panel dataset of 10,214 US arts and cultural nonprofits from 2005 to 2017 (N = 54,877) and employing hierarchical linear modeling, the study finds that nonprofits in counties with higher resource competition and those with larger boards of directors tend to have more diversified revenue portfolios. Conversely, nonprofits in more resourceful counties are less likely to diversify their revenue mixes. These findings advance the nonprofit finance literature and offer insights into how nonprofits can design their revenue strategies under varying conditions.

Volunteers are frequently assigned illegitimate tasks that exceed what can be reasonably required from them. In this study, we used affective events theory to investigate the impact of illegitimate tasks on volunteer engagement. We developed a moderated mediation model and analyzed the mediating role of emotional labor and moderating role of power distance. Based on data from a three-wave survey of 1,948 volunteers, we found that illegitimate tasks negatively affected volunteers' subsequent work engagement. Our results show that emotional labor is the mechanism through which illegitimate tasks affect engagement. By identifying a dual pathway, we demonstrate that illegitimate tasks affected the two strategies for dealing with emotional labor differently, causing volunteers to increase surface acting and decrease deep acting. The volunteers’ power distance has a moderating role, weakening the positive effect of illegitimate tasks on volunteers’ surface acting while enhancing the negative effect of illegitimate tasks on volunteers’ deep acting, reducing subsequent engagement.

Previous research suggests that empathy is a strong contributor to altruistic behavior. However, there is a lack of research regarding the role of empathy in long-term, effortful altruistic acts such as volunteering. In this preregistered study, we aimed to understand the moderating role of belief in a just world in the association between induced empathy and intentions to volunteer among both volunteers (N = 99) and non-volunteers (N = 203). Participants were randomly assigned to either the experimental group (N = 149) or the neutral group (N = 153). In the experimental group, participants read a text about the suffering of an individual with a chronic illness. In the control group, participants read a text about a typical Tuesday for someone. Then, all participants were asked to complete surveys regarding empathy levels, prosocial intentions, belief in a just world, and demographics. Results showed that inducing empathy did not directly affect the levels of intention to volunteer in the future. However, empathy induction was effective for non-volunteers, particularly those with lower levels of personal (but not general) belief in a just world. These results suggest that increasing levels of empathy might be ineffective when personal belief in a just world poses a barrier to displaying volunteering acts. Notably, these findings were observed specifically for non-volunteers, not for volunteers. Thus, future research should explore potential differences due to previous volunteering experiences and the levels of belief in a just world in the motivating roles of empathic concerns for displaying long-term, effortful helping behaviors.

We investigate how nonprofit organizations (NPOs) construct imaginaries of their premises, their local environment, and beyond. Based on a qualitative analysis of the websites of 209 randomly sampled NPOs in a metropolitan region in Central Europe, we find four distinct spatial imaginaries: (1) The world polity imaginary constructs NPOs as a part of a spatial environment that is neatly divided into nation states, supranational structures, and subnational units. (2) In the world society imaginary, NPOs are active in blurred, fluid, and overlapping spaces such as networks, commercialized spaces, or natural habitats. (3) In a religious imaginary, the material world is complemented by a transcendental realm and categorized into spaces of the sacred and the evil. (4) Finally, in a lococentric imaginary, NPOs construct a dichotomy between "home" and the alien rest of the world. Each of these spatial imaginaries conveys distinctive ways of situating the organization in their spatial environment and implies specific organizational practices and emotional enchantments of space.

This study explores the concept of representation from the perspectives of environmental nonprofits. While nonprofits often serve as intermediaries between the public and government, the mechanisms through which they understand and advocate for the needs of their constituents remain underexplored, particularly in the environmental policy field where justice issues often arise. This article organizes the representation literature around three dimensions or key questions: How do organizations define their constituents? How do organizations connect with constituents? And, what authority do constituent preferences carry? Answers to these questions are derived from interviews with 22 environmental nonprofits engaged in state-level energy policy in three US states: Colorado, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. Results demonstrate the utility of the three dimensions in describing the range of responses relevant to the subject organizations, along with key themes and trends among this subgroup of environmental nonprofits.

Community Development (CD) is a process to favour the socio-economic development of communities through the engagement of citizens, social workers, public authorities or non-profit organizations. Over the last decades, theories and practices of the CD have spread all over the world. Italy has a consistent “Third Sector” (TS) with a long-standing tradition; Despite the absence of a well-defined area of the Italian CD, in recent years, particularly within theso-called Third Sector (TS), there has been to develop characterizes of the CD. This paper aims to theorize the features of the CD in the Italian TS. The research engages representatives of 23 organizations—from neighbourhood associations to foundations and national bodies—and investigates through qualitative semi-structured interviews how they promote and conceptualize CD processes. Through the framework of international theories, it is possible to define the field of the CD in the Italian TS.

This paper explores the timing of accountability, systematically examining ‘accountability when?’ in the context of Indonesian credit unions as member-based social enterprises. It examines pre, per, and post factum accountability within two credit unions whose missions focused on member empowerment. Primary data includes 10 focus group discussions and nine interviews with credit union members and management, government, and industry association representatives. Secondary data includes strategic and business plans of the two organisations. Findings reveal the importance of accountability timing, and associated power implications. Reflecting on the interrelated nature of pre, per, and post factum accountability practices highlights a circle of accountability; the linkage between these forms creating a virtuous circle.

Volunteers’ time contributions have decreased in some European societies, and researchers have sought to understand why. This study aims to uncover the relationship between work-family life changes and changes in individual voluntary behaviour with volunteers’ time contributions. To analyse how determinants for volunteer time contributions have changed over time, we draw on cross-sectional data from the German Survey on Volunteering. We apply Poisson regressions for the time period 1999–2019 on nearly 22,000 volunteers. We find a tendency towards decreasing volunteer time contributions. In line with the role-overload theory, longer working hours are increasingly negatively associated with volunteer hours over this period. However, there is no consistent change over time in the association between responsibility for a pre-school child and volunteer hours. Contrary to the theory on the changing nature of volunteering, we do not find conclusive evidence that the shift towards voluntary activities in individually organised, non-hierarchical settings is connected to decreases in volunteer hours.

Ethical consumerism describes market transactions where consumers’ preferences stretch beyond immediate self-interest to prosocial objectives. How such activities relate to more traditional forms of civic engagement (such as giving or activism) remains unclear; as a market-situated activity, ethical consumerism is often omitted from accounts of civic engagement or predicted to erode commitment to civic action. This paper reports findings from an empirical study of the civic identity of the ethical consumer. Using an online survey instrument, the study explores statistical relationships between individuals’ actual participation in ethical consumerism at three sites (Fairtrade, TOMS Shoes and (RED)) and the extent of individuals’ wider civic engagement—both philanthropic (giving, volunteering) and activist (campaigning). It finds evidence of a consistent civic identity that stretches across traditional civic engagement activities and ethical consumerism: the greater an individual’s civic engagement, the more likely they are to engage in ethical consumerism. The current analytic separation of ethical consumerism and civic engagement, therefore, does not capture the experience of individuals who are expanding their prosocial repertoire from the civic sphere to the market sphere; civic engagement cuts across sectors.

Assessing the impact of the nonprofit sector on society has been one of the most fundamental yet challenging questions in public and nonprofit management scholarship. Built on a recent systematic literature review published in VOLUNTAS (Cheng and Choi in Int J Volunt Nonprofit Organ 33:1245–1255, 2022), our meta-analysis synthesizes the existing literature from multiple disciplines and fills this critical knowledge gap. Using 357 effects from 29 studies, our moderation analysis shows that a larger nonprofit sector has a more positive impact on society especially when the impact is political and measured at the city/county level. Studies that used fixed-effects models and quasi-experimental designs also found a more positive societal impact of the nonprofit sector. However, the choice of sector size measure, the selection of impact measure, the use of lagged explanatory variables, publication bias, and publication time seem not to matter.

Scholarly literature on cross-sectoral collaboration is rich, but incomplete as most studies tend to overlook nuances across different service categories. Though many studies confirm that collaboration may vary by specific service type, very few ask how and why? This study contributes to this area of inquiry by exploring these questions in the context of nonprofit-local government collaboration in a developing country in which nonprofit organizations play a major role in public service delivery, expanding analysis beyond the traditional western settings that dominate current scholarship. Analyzing a unique dataset of survey responses from 223 Lebanese nonprofit managers, we find that local-nonprofit collaboration likelihood does indeed vary by the nonprofit’s service focus. This is consistent with existing scholarship. Further, we extend the analysis to examine whether and how a set of underlying features that shape collaboration vary by service category. Patterns emerge to explain the association between the service category and perceptions of weak institutional features in the collaboration landscape. We offer explanations for these findings, drawing on specific characteristics of selected services and the mechanisms through which they could influence collaboration and its dynamics.