Previous studies have shown that social enterprises can improve the health conditions of socially disadvantaged people through qualitative approaches. As income-related health inequality has grown, the role of social enterprises in addressing this issue has become more significant. This study examined whether social enterprises could positively affect the self-rated health of South Korean low-income residents using multilevel models. The results showed that government-certified social enterprises were associated with positive self-rated health among low-income residents. On the other hand, preliminary social enterprises with insufficient profitability and weak corporate governance showed mixed results. Based on the empirical results, this study suggests relevant policy implications.

The objective of this study is to develop and test a conceptual model exploring the structural relationship between significant values and variables in volunteer management and corporate sponsorship in order to seek a potential link for corporate engagement in the support of volunteers for the development of volunteer management and retention strategies. We collected data from a sample of 470 volunteers who participated in the 28th Southeast Asian Games held in Singapore in 2015. We conducted a structural equation modeling to test the hypotheses of the conceptual model. The results show that person-task and person-organization fit enhance both volunteer retention and application value of employer branding through the serial mediation effect of empowerment and social capital. The findings imply that providing volunteers with opportunities for social capital experiences (e.g., trusty networks, social development, and cooperation; developing new relationships) can be efficient to ensure the sustainable volunteer management.

Our study examined whether collaboration enhances employees’ knowledge and commitments, thus improving the quality of treatment and services they supply and resulting in enhanced employee output and increased efficiency and social effectiveness of the organization. Data were collected from three sources: senior managers, employees, and customers (268 participants involved in 25 collaborative projects). Using a cross-sectional design with survey sampling, we aggregated individual data to the project level and tested whether average scores differed significantly across projects. The results suggest that quality of service had a significant and positive impact on project output. In addition, collaboration had a significant and positive influence on employee trust. Thus, projects conducted with high collaborative standards achieved better outputs: Workers improved their professional knowledge, therefore improving the level of treatment and quality of service.

The proposition that restricted revenues inhibit nonprofit service delivery by reducing their financial discretion has accumulated in the academic literature but has not been empirically tested. Using a sample of arts and culture nonprofits in the USA, this study examines whether the proposition is upheld through a resource dependence lens. The results suggest that restricted revenues limit nonprofits’ efforts to seek other sources of revenue, which leads to a decrease in nonprofit service delivery. The results also suggest that this indirect effect holds and is even more pronounced in donative and performing arts nonprofits. Restricted revenues, however, do not curb nonprofits’ administrative expenses, and an increase in administrative expenses does not lead to an increase in nonprofit service delivery. The prevailing notion that restricted revenues force nonprofits to shift their cost structures away from administrative expenses may need to be reconsidered. Overall, this study partially supports the proposition that financial discretion plays a role in explaining the negative relationship between restricted revenues and nonprofit service delivery.

Giving circles and alumni campaigns are popular forms of nonprofit fund-raising practice that may lead to positive peer effects that promote charitable giving among similar individuals. However, do individuals always give more in the presence of similar others? Most research finds a positive social influence among similar individuals in donor–solicitor and donor–recipient dyads. However, in donor–donor dyads, the effects of social influence on charitable giving are mixed. Individuals’ giving can be positively or negatively affected by other donors’ giving. This systematic literature review (35 eligible studies) investigates how individuals’ charitable giving is affected by the giving of others. Its major contribution is to extend the previous literature by proposing a new mechanism of decision making in charitable giving through an important psychological construct (similarity). It also identifies five critical factors that could help to explain inconsistent findings of similarity effects on two measures of charitable giving (giving propensity and giving amount). It also contributes to identifying a literature gap, suggesting future research directions, and providing important implications to fund-raising practice.

In Latin America, the emergence of a series of civil society initiatives aimed at citizen engagement for social accountability and democratization in local governance has been a novelty since the 2000s. One of these initiatives is the Latin American Network for Fair, Democratic and Sustainable Cities and Territories, which congregates over 70 initiatives in 10 countries. This article describes and analyzes the nature of civil society initiatives, their repertoires of actions, and their incidence in processes of transparency and accountability, citizen participation, public policies, and local governance. The research was conducted between 2012 and 2016, including a questionnaire with 23 initiatives in 8 countries, interviews, participant observation, and document analysis. The results show the emergence of cross-sectional and systemic accountability, counting on collaboration and co-production of information and control between citizens and government agencies.

The rise of citizens’ initiatives is changing the relation between governments and citizens. This paper contributes to the discussion of how governments can productively relate to these self-organizing citizens. The study analyzes the relation between the social production of invited spaces and the invitational character of such spaces, as perceived by governments and citizens. Invited spaces are the (institutional, legal, organizational, political and policy) spaces that are created by governments for citizens to take on initiatives to create public value. We characterize four types of invited spaces and compare four cases in Dutch planning to analyze how these types of invited spaces are perceived as invitational. From the analysis, we draw specific lessons for governments that want to stimulate citizens’ initiatives. We conclude with a general insight for public administration scholars; in addition to formal rules and structures, scholars should pay more attention to interactions, attitudes and meaning making of both government officials and citizens.

Although government-organized volunteering is common in China, the Chinese government has also sought to encourage the development of grassroots volunteer service organizations (VSOs) given the tremendous social service burden and the complexity of social governance. Motivated by the lack of systematic studies on volunteering in China, this study explores predictors of volunteering in urban China using data from the 2013 Survey on Philanthropic Behaviors of Urban Citizens in China. The findings indicate that generalized trust, membership in the Chinese Communist Party and type of work unit are significantly associated with the government-organized volunteering. Similar to Western countries, education, religiosity and social capital variables all help in explaining grassroots VSO-organized volunteering. Interestingly, the association between grassroots VSO-organized volunteering and trust in the central government with regard to both participation probability and time devoted to volunteering is significantly positive, whereas the association between grassroots VSO-organized volunteering and trust in local government, for both participation probability and time devoted to volunteering, is significantly negative.

Although evidence shows that it is challenging to implement, many authors state that participatory management is a distinctive attribute of social enterprises. This paper presents case study research exploring how participatory management is manifest in Chile, a country where a paternalistic and autocratic management style prevails thereby constraining the adoption of more collaborative approaches. We found that a majority of the twenty social enterprises considered, despite having very different sizes, governance structure and activity sectors, involved employees and stakeholders in shared decision-making processes. Participatory management was exhibited in distinctive and diverse ways ranging from common agreement on strategic decisions through to the presentation of new proposals by members. We conclude that social enterprises in Chile differ from conventional enterprises not only in their focus on trying to solve social problems, but also in the fact that they may provide a vehicle to promote more innovative and participatory approaches to decision making.

This article explores the relationship between implicit (unconscious) color bias and giving by answering the research question: How does a donor’s implicit color biases affect giving to beneficiaries living in developing countries? The study draws from a fundraising survey consisting of 750 participants measuring their implicit biases using the Skin-tone Implicit Association Test (IAT) and their willingness to give along with their sociodemographic data. The findings show higher implicit color biases reduce the probability of giving a higher donation (more than $10). The results provide important new evidence about the negative relationship between implicit color bias and giving and highlight ethical concerns regarding the portrayal of beneficiaries in fundraising advertisements.

This paper examines whether three sets of factors—humanitarianism, the South Korean government’s official aid, and concerns regarding performance—affect South Korean CSOs’ decisions regarding aid recipients and the amount of aid to them. The statistical results of these two-stage analyses show that South Korean CSOs take into consideration different sets of factors at each stage of their aid allocation decisions. While humanitarianism and ODA allocation are consistently important at both stages of South Korean CSOs’ aid allocation decisions, performance concerns for aid effectiveness and efficiency (language and religion) matter especially at the second stage. Governance level of a developing country has a positive relationship with aid allocation decisions, while the direction of influence changes when only recipient countries are included in the regression analysis. These findings suggest that concerns regarding accountability and autonomy of CSOs in the context of their growing engagement in development cooperation may be unwarranted.

Inspired by the South American research tradition known as “social technology,” this article proposes an operational framework to advance the understanding of mechanisms that help to promote social transformation. To illustrate its theorizing potential, we apply the framework to a nonprofit organization–Parole d’excluEs–that was created in Montreal (Canada) in 2006 and that has been promoting citizen mobilization and commitment to social change (parole-dexclues.ca). To that end, we offer a theoretical paper with an empirical illustration as a first step in a reflection on employing a global South theoretical lens–drawing on the concept of social technology–to make sense of a global North social innovation experience and to advance existing knowledge on the mechanisms of social transformation. The results contribute to social innovation research and practice, particularly at the interface between the management and nonprofit literatures.

Social innovation (SI) is a promising concept that has been developed and mobilized in academia, government policies, philanthropic programs, entrepreneurial projects. Scholars propose multiple conceptions and categorization of what is SI (trajectories, approaches, theoretical strands, paradigms, streams). Some recent work has also addressed the question of who is doing SI. In both cases, the what and the who remain the key characteristic of SI. Two approaches are confronted: one where SI is more presented as a concept that reproduces the neoliberal–capitalist societies; a second that conceives SI as a transformative and emancipatory pathway. With this article, I contribute to the possibilities to conceive SI as performative concept. My proposition is to analyze SI as a discourse with precise performative practices and apparatus. By doing so, it allows scholars and practitioners to better reflect and identify the effects, tensions and ambivalence and possibilities of SI. Moreover, it gives us few key aspects of what might constitute an emancipatory social innovation.

We examine the likelihood of collaboration between NGOs and business in persistent intense social contexts. Using social capital theory and the institutional void literature, we argue that an NGO’s stakeholder relations act as a valuable resource in the formation of the organization’s social capital and raise its potential value as a legitimate business partner relative to NGOs with weak or few relations. These relations, however, are moderated by the persistent intense social context in which the NGO finds itself. Using Mexican data, we find that the positive relationship between stakeholder interactions and the likelihood of NGO–business collaboration is weakened by greater poverty (ties are more difficult to establish) and strengthened by corruption (ties provide a trust signal).

Community foundations exemplify a growing form of place-based philanthropic efforts for addressing public problems. However, why do such efforts occur in some places, but not in others? Using an original population dataset of community foundations that combines community characteristics with service area data across 3130 US counties, the empirical analyses of hurdle negative binomial models reveal distinct patterns in explaining their locational distribution and philanthropic activities. Community foundations tend to emerge or flourish in urban communities which are White-dominant, ethnically homogeneous, and less religious but have more social and human capital. Crossing the zero hurdle, their philanthropic activities tend to bloom in ethnically diverse and unequal communities but plummet in highly educated communities with more high-income earners, whereas rural and vulnerable communities with high proportions of residents who are young, old, unemployed, and disabled exemplify potential service gaps of community foundations associated with their rarity and/or fewer philanthropic activities. This study presents a community assessment model and empirical evidence of what might promote and inhibit the occurrence of community philanthropic efforts.

This study examines the impact of external environment on social enterprises’ revenues strategies. Using a national survey of 1250 social enterprises in Canada, this study tests whether institutional constraints and market competition affect commercialization and revenue diversification of social enterprises. The results suggest that social enterprises’ revenue strategies are associated with both institutional constraints and market competition. With institutional constraints, for-profit and cooperative social enterprises rely more on commercial revenues and have a less diverse revenue structure than their nonprofit counterparts. In addition, social enterprises with parent organizations tend to be more commercialized. With market competition, specialist social enterprises providing social services have a more concentrated revenue structure than generalist social enterprises, while specialist social enterprises providing culture services rely less on commercial revenues and have a more diverse revenue structure than generalist social enterprises. The findings offer implications for social enterprises to rethink financial flexibility and autonomy.

China has experienced a striking rise of volunteerism in the past three decades while the civil society is still incipient and repressed by the authoritarian state. This seeming paradox alludes to the critical role of the state, which has been well noted but scarcely examined in the extant literature on Chinese volunteering. Analyzing 103 government documents associated with volunteering that were published between 1986 and 2017, this study explores the state’s roles and motivations in fostering volunteerism. It finds that Chinese volunteering has been incorporated into the state’s ruling scheme by developing a state-controlled volunteer service system. Volunteering is utilized for strengthening the state’s ideological hegemony, implementing innovative social management for social stability, and facilitating the Chinese Communist Party’s party building for its long-term rule. Implications and suggestions for future research are included.

In contrast to previous studies that emphasized how resources and institutional forces influence nonprofit organizations (NPOs)’ use of information and communications technologies (ICTs), specifically on using social media for external stakeholder engagement, we examine the relationship between the organizational culture and NPOs’ use of old and new ICTs for external and internal communication. Drawing from surveys of 500 Korean NPOs, we found that cultural values and communication practices influence NPOs’ use of traditional, digital, and sharing media differently for different communication goals. NPOs with authoritarian cultures used every possible medium, including traditional media, for internal communication to improve their performance, while family-like NPOs lagged in using new ICTs. Information-transparent practices predicted more use of ICTs, whereas collaborative and democratic communication practices did not. Implications for understanding NPOs’ use of varied ICTs by considering the organizational cultures and different communication goals are discussed.

Including vulnerable citizens in public co-production can have a huge bearing on the quality and equity of the services on which they depend. This study explores the influence of bonding, bridging, and linking social capital networks and the inherent notion of trust on co-production with vulnerable citizens. The study has found the formation of social capital to be a significant influencer on enabling co-production with vulnerable citizens. This is particularly so when engaging the citizens at earlier stages in the public service cycle than the implementation phase. Being engaged at these stages positively influences the motivation to participate. The end-user as co-designer, or co-initiator of public services, is rarely found in the literature. This study contributes to fill this gap. Furthermore, calculus-based trust is identified as a main factor influencing the willingness of potential co-production partners to engage in co-production. The findings are based on observations, documents, and interviews from an extreme case where a group of Danish-Somali women, (this particular group being among the most vulnerable in Danish society), changed from being dismissive potential co-implementers to becoming co-initiators of co-production aimed at preventing crime among Danish-Somali youth.