This virtual issue focuses on organizational change in nonprofit organizations, as reflected in articles published in Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations. As guest editors, our goal for this virtual issue was to explore contemporary developments regarding the role that organizational change plays within nonprofit organizational research. This overarching goal encompasses three aspects: (1) exploring the theoretical and conceptual frameworks and methodological considerations used when studying “organizational change”; (2) presenting the selected articles and their key takeaways for organizational change literature in the nonprofit context; and (3) illuminating three themes and avenues for future research within the journal.
Methodology/Article Selection for the Virtual Issue
To present findings from the most contemporary literature, we systematically reviewed articles published in Voluntas over the last 10 years (2014–2024), using the keyword search term “change” in titles and abstracts. This search yielded a broad and inclusive net, ensuring that no article addressing organizational change was overlooked. The abstracts were sorted into those that unquestionably address organizational change, those that do not, and those requiring further consideration, and discussion. This process yielded 15 potential manuscripts for the virtual issue.
Subsequently, we reviewed the full texts of the 15 identified articles and excluded another seven articles. These articles were excluded because they did not directly address organizational change or because they focused on external dynamics, such as how organizational change affects the policy process. In the following, we present each of these selected articles, highlighting their contributions to the literature on organizational change in nonprofit organizations.
The Selected Articles and Their Contributions
The majority of the selected articles explored organizational change as a consequence of exogenous demands from the institutional environment. The article “The Next ‘New’ Idea: The Challenges of Organizational Change, Decline, and Renewal in Australian Meals on Wheels” by Melanie Oppenheimer, Jeni Warburton, and Janene Carey (2014) uses neo-institutional theory and theories of the role of power to examine how institutional change influences the organization Meals on Wheels in Australia. This qualitative study is based on interviews with 13 Meals on Wheels leaders, both paid and unpaid. From a managerial point of view, the authors illuminate the tensions that this organization faces between the traditional values upheld by volunteers and the market-oriented concerns of efficiency and productivity upheld by paid managers. With an increasingly regulatory environment and professionalization pressures, managers highlight the need for effective internal change management, particularly as the volunteer workforce resists change. The emphasized urgency is that the organization cannot keep pace with the ever-changing expectations from external stakeholders, forces which are increasingly causing volunteers to leave their volunteering positions.
In another analysis of organizational response to external jolts, Michael Meyer and Ruth Simsa (2018) discuss how different organizational responses of civil society organizations (CSOs) to a mass influx of refugees into Austria reflect variations in their internal organizational structures. Using systems and organizational learning theories, the study conducts a longitudinal case study of three organizations in the context of the refugee crisis in 2015, when over a million refugees from the Middle East arrived in Austria. Titled “Organizing the Unexpected: How Civil Society Organizations Dealt with the Refugee Crisis,” the authors argue that, in times of crisis, organizational learning depends on the flexibility and stability of structural elements. Utilizing Luhmann’s (Reference Luhmann, Küpper and Ortmann1988) theory of social systems, the authors focus their analysis on programs, communication channels, and personnel as structural elements. Findings indicate the need to balance redundancy (i.e., structural limitation of decisions for predictability and regularity) and variety (i.e., increasing complexity to enhance the diversity of decisions) in programs, communication channels, and personnel in times of crisis as a tenet of their organizational structure.
The interconnectedness of nonprofit organizations with their institutional environment as a source of organizational change is reflected in other selected articles, including “Serve or Conserve: Mission, Strategy, and Multi-level Nonprofit Change During the Great Recession” by Horvath et al. (Reference Horvath, Brandtner and Powell2018). This study explores multi-level relational and recursive organizational change in practices and how this change influences the organizations’ reactions to exogenous demands. The authors conduct a longitudinal study (2005–2015) of 196 representative 501(c)(3) public charities in the San Francisco Bay Area, using multiple sources of data (e.g., IRS data, foundation grant data, surveys, and interviews). Findings highlight important predictors of organizational insolvency alongside the organizations' ability to serve their clients post-recession. Specifically, public charities that had an orientation toward the needy during the Great Recession were more likely to increase their spending. Those charities that incorporated strategic planning and strategic thinking had a lower likelihood of spending and insolvency. Adapted responses and resiliency were not necessarily a question of survival in all cases, as charities, for example, felt a moral obligation to increase their spending to serve the needy in times of crisis.
Marketization and state intervention are other exogenous forces within the institutional environment that spur endogenous organizational change in nonprofits. In “Investigating the Marketization of the Nonprofit Sector: A Comparative Case Study of Two Nonprofit Organizations,” Sandberg et al. (Reference Sandberg, Elliott and Petchel2020) argue that marketization is a situated process, leading nonprofit organizations to adopt various strategic responses to market logic. This is reflected in changes in organizational structures, practices, and processes. Using the conceptual framework of neoliberalism and Christine Oliver’s (Reference Oliver1991) work on differentiated strategic responses to institutional pressures, this comparative case study of two nonprofits suggests that growing marketization indicates variation in organizational behavior: One nonprofit organization embraced an entrepreneurial orientation owing to neoliberal market pressures, while the other endorsed a traditional community orientation with more professionalization. Such variation, the authors contend, is a result of the influence of the organizational context on the enactment of marketization ideas.
Whereas Sandberg and her colleagues explore how nonprofit organizations are influenced by market and marketization pressures, Pan and Xu (Reference Pan and Xu2022) examine structural organizational changes following state pressure and intervention. Employing a longitudinal study design of 15 service-oriented nonprofit organizations in Guangdong Province, China, the authors show how the expansion of funding regulations by the government has contributed to the rise of hierarchization within the sampled NGOs. The organizational responses to these exogenous governmental pressures have varied from full compliance to resistance, reflected in changes in organizational structures, leadership recruitment, and member power dynamics. Similar to Sandberg et al. (Reference Sandberg, Elliott and Petchel2020), Pan and Xu (Reference Pan and Xu2022) use Oliver’s (Reference Oliver1991) theoretical framework. This framework incorporates the institutional and resource dependency perspectives to indicate strategic differences in organizational responses between those organizations seeking to gain legitimacy and those that strive for tangible resources. Pan and Xu (Reference Pan and Xu2022) portray the crucial role of the organizational agency of cultural beliefs by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in China, in responding differently to exogenous demands. The findings indicate that the rising interdependence, particularly through state funding interventions and the different organizational behaviors exhibited as a result, may contribute to increasing inequality in volunteering and may even lead to voluntary failure.
Two other selected articles focus on organizational transformation from one organizational form into another (Borchgrevink, Reference Borchgrevink2020; Edenfield & Andersson, Reference Edenfield and Andersson2018). First, Kaja Borchgrevink’s (Reference Borchgrevink2020) qualitative study describes significant organizational transformations occurring within two Islamic welfare organizations during the process of becoming NGOs. In the transition period from a religiously oriented entity to a professional NGO, these two humanitarian aid organizations underwent changes in their legal status, organizational structures, operational practices, and discourse. These multiple changes facilitated the emergence of a new organizational identity that aimed to balance the initial Islamic framework with professionalization, depoliticization, and the incorporation of the language of development. Such organizational changes—including organizational discourse, principles, and enacted practices—brought greater legitimation, both within the old milieu of supporters and among the newly attracted stakeholders.
Edenfield and Andersson’s (Reference Edenfield and Andersson2018) manuscript presents an account of the transformation of a social venture from a nascent stage to a formalized nonprofit organization. Using actor-network theory and organizational life-cycle literature, the authors explore the agency of nonprofit entrepreneurs in creating a nonprofit social venture during a 2-year ethnographic study of a single entrepreneurial cooperative in a Midwestern American city. Three evolutionary stages are delineated during the transition of the entrepreneurial cooperative: a nascent stage, a phase of instability undergirded by crisis and conflict, and a formal stage in which a new nonprofit venture emerges. The authors emphasize the importance of the antecedents of imprinting and the actual processes in the dynamics of social venture formation.
Finally, Malin Arvidson (Reference Arvidson2018) presents multiple processes of endogenous organizational change that together exhibit what she labels an intraorganizational movement. Using a longitudinal qualitative research design that focuses on one nonprofit organization in England from 2010 to 2013, Arvidson offers a framework consisting of four components of (emotional and cognitive) change processes, all of which, in combination, embody the organization as a movement. The framework includes two types of change—evolving change and episodic change—and two sources of tension in the flow of change: inherent dilemmas and conflicting logics. The framework serves to describe the ever-evolving components of organizational change that contribute to identity formation at the individual and organizational levels within nonprofit organizations.
Themes and Avenues for Future Research
Against the background of the eight articles selected above, we discuss themes that describe the status quo of the research on organizational change in Voluntas over the last decade and highlight avenues for future research.
Theme 1: The State of the Art in Research on Organizational Change
The current state of research concerning organizational change in the nonprofit literature appears to be nascent. When we were putting together this virtual issue, we were surprised by the low number of articles that focused on organizational change in the last decade. This trend carries over to the broader nonprofit literature and is confirmed by a scoping review of nonprofit literature published between 1973 and 2019 (Walk et al., Reference Walk, Cart-Turner, Peterson and Klippel2024). Some of our sampled articles have noted this paucity as well (Arvidson, Reference Arvidson2018; Horvath et al., Reference Horvath, Brandtner and Powell2018). Our investigation showed a surge of interest in organizational change in 2018, with several articles focusing on this topic published in the same issue (Volume 29, issue 5) of Voluntas (see Arvidson, Reference Arvidson2018; Edenfield & Andersson, Reference Edenfield and Andersson2018; Horvath et al., Reference Horvath, Brandtner and Powell2018).
Theme 2: Anchoring Articles in Organization Theory and Organizational Change Literature
This virtual issue, along with the results of a recent systematic review (Walk et al., Reference Walk, Cart-Turner, Peterson and Klippel2024), suggests that while a range of articles describe organizational change, the research is not sufficiently anchored in organizational change theory and research. For instance, articles do not consistently offer a definition of organizational change, and there is a lack of clarity about how and why an organizational change lens is applied in various contexts. A solid grounding in organizational theory could potentially explain why organizational change or inertia occurs at the individual, organizational, and field levels and what role and impact it may have. Other insights could be generated on how organizational change is spurred by institutional entrepreneurs (Battilana et al., Reference Battilana, Leca and Boxenbaum2009; Lawrence et al., Reference Lawrence, Suddaby, Leca, Lawrence, Suddaby and Leca2009) or by less powerful actors (DiMaggio & Powell, Reference DiMaggio, Powell, Powell and DiMaggio1991) and how they may, in turn, even gain the ability to affect diverse organizational fields. New perspectives would go beyond the common use of new institutional theory, which many authors in the nonprofit sector are keen to use to depict the organizational change that results from exogenous societal demands (Arvidson, Reference Arvidson2018).
The success of organizational change initiatives often depends on the support of those charged with change implementation. This usually concerns employees, which in the nonprofit context increasingly means volunteers. We encourage nonprofit researchers to more directly integrate knowledge on reactions to organizational change at an individual level (e.g., Oreg et al., Reference Oreg, Vakola and Armenakis2011; Yin et al., Reference Yin, Mueller and Wakslak2024). Those are mostly found in management and applied psychology journals, with insights not sufficiently integrated into nonprofit research.
Further, a significant contribution to the current knowledge base in the nonprofit sector would be studies that offer theoretical insights into the process of organizational change. Other authors have emphasized that process is under-theorized in current research on nonprofit organizations (see, for example, Arvidson, Reference Arvidson2018; Edenfield & Andersson, Reference Edenfield and Andersson2018); yet, it has a long tradition in the organizational literature (e.g., Armenakis & Bedeian, Reference Armenakis and Bedeian1999; Weick & Quinn, Reference Weick and Quinn1999). These studies would also enable researchers to pay particular attention to temporality and the rate of change, illuminating the dynamics of organizational change within a spectrum, from incremental to more comprehensive change, such as organizational transformation.
Theme 3: Methodology
Seven out of the eight selected studies used qualitative approaches, relying primarily on interviews and analysis of secondary materials, with some employing longitudinal qualitative approaches. One study used a mixed method approach with multiple data sources. Most of the reviewed literature—including seven out of eight of the selected studies for this virtual issue—relied on case studies methodology; three of the papers used a single case study only, while another three papers compared two or three organizations. We emphasize the call by other authors to tackle the over-reliance on a single case in future analyses (Oppenheimer et al., Reference Oppenheimer, Warburton and Carey2015). We encourage authors to conduct multiple case studies, which strengthen the validity, stability, and trustworthiness of the data, as well as allow for generalization from one case to the next for theory building or theory testing. Quantitative studies with larger samples or studies using longitudinal approaches could capture organizational change more systematically. This would contribute to the knowledge base on outputs, outcomes, and impact of organizational change, which would further advance our understanding of the benefits and pitfalls of change.
To conclude, this virtual issue highlights articles that capture the current state of research on organizational change, as published in Voluntas over the last decade. We genuinely hope that the gaps highlighted within the themes of this virtual issue will open new possibilities for future research within Voluntas and beyond. Understanding the ever-evolving change nonprofit organizations face today will advance our knowledge and understanding on how to build more resilient organizations of tomorrow.
