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.

Human resources are vital to an organization’s success and are a driving force behind innovation processes. This study examines the influence of various employee characteristics and their effect on the innovation culture with public and nonprofit organizations (innovation climate). Using data collected from 1220 public and nonprofit employees, we evaluate the role of various elements such as work motivation, job flexibility, and financial motivation, and how they affect an innovation culture within organizations. Findings from a series of OLS regressions suggest that job flexibility, the quality and reputation of the organization, and importance placed on work are positively related to both public and nonprofit innovation climates. Personnel inflexibility negatively affects the innovation climate in both the public and nonprofit sectors, and the effects of other variables, including advancement motivation, vary by sector.

Corruption attracts scholar attention due to its harsh impact on people and institutions, especially in nonprofit organizations traditionally associated with altruistic intents. Although many scandals have shaken the third sector, rare are the studies that offer a true understanding of how corruption occurs. Our research provides insights into the corruption phenomenon in the context of the Syrian refugee crisis in Lebanon. The findings show the powerlessness of public institutions, the chaotic working environments of humanitarian organizations, managerial malpractices, and inefficiencies in projects, all leading to unethical choices and to corrupt behaviors perpetrated by humanitarian agencies. The theoretical model that we propose brings new understanding of the relationships between nonprofit management, coordination, and corruption in the aid sector. On the practical front, it offers suggestions to public policy makers and practitioners about preventing corruption even during crisis situations.

Drawing upon Hannah Arendt’s adherence to existential phenomenology, the article advances a political understanding and interpretation of community organizing. Arendt, it is maintained, offers valuable insight into political phenomena which are constitutive of community organizing. Four aspects, in particular, are highlighted—what I refer to as the four “A”s of association, action, appearance and authenticity—understood in existentialist, phenomenological, ontological and ultimately political terms, as primary ways of being-together-politically. The first part of the article examines Arendt’s existential phenomenological approach in shaping her understanding of the political. This provides the theoretical basis for examining in the second part of the article, phenomena which are constitutive of community organizing, highlighting how association, action, appearance and authenticity form distinctive political characteristics of community organizing as an approach. At different points, brief reference is made to the work of London Citizens, the largest broad-based organization in the UK, in order to illustrate the connections between Arendtian thought and community-based organizing.

The financial sustainability of nonprofit organizations is an abiding concern. One generally accepted solution for threats to nonprofit financial sustainability is the adoption of business practices such as commercial revenue. Institutional theory, joined by empirical evidence, suggests that nonprofit practitioners may (or may not) perceive a conflict between their social mission and business practices, which is a perquisite to developing a strategic response. Through a multi-site ethnography, I examine how nonprofit practitioners respond to pressures to enact business practices. The cognitive schema practitioners in this study use to justify that managerialization rationalizes business practices as means to achieving the mission. This schema explains why potential conflicts between business practices and the social mission went largely unnoticed and led, in large part, to passive acquiescence. The lack of perceived conflict captured in this study may be concerning because without conflict business practices may lead to unintended negative consequences such as mission drift.

Media plays a major role in molding US public opinions about Muslims. This paper assesses the effect of 9/11 events on the US media's framing of the Muslim nonprofit sector. Overall it finds that the press was more likely to represent the Muslim nonprofit negatively post 9/11. However, post 9/11, the media framing of Muslim nonprofits was mixed. While the media was more likely to associate Muslim nonprofits and terrorism, they were also more likely to represent Muslim nonprofits as organizations that faced persecution because of Islamophobia, government scrutiny, or hate attacks against them. These media frames may have contributed to public perceptions that Muslim organizations support terrorism while also raising the alarm amongst various stakeholders that the government and the general public are persecuting the Muslim nonprofit sector.

In the 1970s, the voluntary sector acted as a key space for advocacy and support for communities that were marginalised from statutory provision. This paper explores how East London voluntary sector organisations addressed the needs of new migrant communities in this period. Drawing on data from six case study organisations, this historical study explores the dual role these organisations played in advocating for these communities and providing needed services. The findings show that in the 1970s through the 1990s advocacy and service delivery functions were closely linked rather than service delivery crowding out advocacy as has been the trend in recent decades. The findings also emphasise the importance of the creation of trusted relationships between the organisations and the communities they served.

As the accountability movement is gaining momentum worldwide, nonprofit organizations are facing increasingly higher institutional requirements in terms of information disclosure. Nonprofit organizations need to disclose information to acquire legitimacy. However, information disclosure increases administrative costs, for which the upper limit is constrained by the law. In order to acquire legitimacy while reducing administrative costs, some of the nonprofit organizations selectively disclose their information. This paper examines the impact exerted on selective information disclosure by political labels. By using the interannual panel data of 4070 charity foundations in China’s Mainland from 2010 to 2014, this study finds out that the political label negatively influences selective information disclosure. This paper contributes to testing correlations between political labels and selective information disclosure in transition economy and provides solid evidence for studying selective information disclosure by nonprofit organizations.

Public policy can directly or indirectly affect private philanthropy. Although previous studies have investigated the role of tax incentives and government grants to nonprofits, scholars do not pay much attention to how public welfare receipt affects philanthropic behavior. This study fills the gap by examining the impact of public assistance use on individual charitable giving using data from the USA and China. We employ propensity score matching to reduce the issue of selection bias and adopt logistic regression and the Tobit model to answer our research question. Our analysis demonstrates the different impacts of public assistance use on charitable giving in the two countries. In the USA, public assistance income is negatively associated with secular giving, and prior public assistance use is negatively related to religious and total giving. However, in China, there is no statistically significant relationship between public assistance use and charitable giving.

Civil society organizations (CSOs) have important roles to play in building trust in post-conflict societies. This research examined how 25 CSO peacebuilders use communication to build trust in Northern Ireland. Our findings suggest that peacebuilders work across different levels of society as trust intermediaries. Communication is central to CSO peacebuilders’ practice in engendering trust and in demonstrating their trustworthiness as individuals, inter-group facilitators and organizational representatives. Synthesized from our data, a communication toolkit from ‘low level’ communication intervention to ‘high level’ persuasion explains the strategies that CSO peacebuilders employ to mitigate distrust and nurture trust as they work towards peace in Northern Ireland. We propose this toolkit might be malleable to trust building in other conflict-affected contexts.

The study investigates the affordances of email newsletters as perceived by the general public subscribers of non-profit organizations’ e-newsletters, through analyzing over 17,000 survey responses. An affordance lens acknowledges the possibility of multiple courses of action and forms of engagement in relation to the technology. Findings reveal that email newsletters may be more useful in terms of relationship cultivation than has been generally recognized, but also that perceptions of email affordances varied considerably between segments of the non-profit sector. While finding no strong links between e-newsletter receipt and volunteering or donation activity, the usefulness of email newsletters in terms of building connection between organization and recipient was confirmed at a moderate level. While illuminating the range of affordances offered by email, which has been largely overlooked in the literature, this study also suggests a number of implications for organizations in the non-profit sector.

While the impact of government interference to the religious domain has long been discussed in previous literature, empirical evidence on the nexus between government intervention to religion and individuals’ giving to religious organizations remains limited. In this study, we aim to fill this gap and examine whether government intervention affects individuals’ giving to faith-based charities. To this end, a survey data conducted in 20 European countries and two measures of government intervention to religion were used. Our empirical investigation based on multilevel logistic regression, after controlling for possible confounding factors at individual and country levels, indicates that government regulation of religion has a significant negative impact both on religious donation and volunteering. The findings of the present study add substantially to our understanding of nexus between government and religion and will serve as a base for future studies.