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Social origins theory proposes that countries cluster around different models according to how public welfare spending affects nonprofit sector scale (Anheier & Salamon, 2006; Salamon & Anheier, 1998). This article confronts these assumptions about a liberal, corporatist, and social democratic model with results from a comparative analysis of highly industrialized countries with extensive welfare arrangements. We focus on nonprofit sector employment in relation to total employment in the welfare field, including education and research, health, and social services. Explanatory factors are public welfare spending, share of income from donations, and religious homogeneity. Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) (Ragin, 2000) is applied to sort countries in types. The results show that the consequences of public sector welfare spending on nonprofit welfare employment vary depending on other social conditions. In liberal countries, low public sector welfare spending results in a small nonprofit share of employment. The preconditions are low religious homogeneity and large shares of nonprofit income from donations. In other Western European countries, the size of public sector welfare spending is inversely proportional with the size of the nonprofit share of employment, depending on religious homogeneity. The Nordic countries have the highest religious homogeneity, and largest public welfare costs, and accordingly, the smallest share of nonprofit welfare services. However, a similar “crowding out” pattern can be found in the presumably corporatist countries such as France, Austria, and also to some extent in Germany and Italy. In the other end of the line, we find the Netherlands, which is the clearest example of the presumed corporatist pattern in this sample. Religious homogeneity comes into play in both the liberal and the Western European causal constellation in accordance with Weisbrod's theory of government failure/market failure (Weisbrod, 1977), which indicates that this factor is more important for nonprofit welfare regimes than previously thought.

In current economic systems, the role played by non-profit and voluntary organisations is relevant. Several studies analyse the development of these organisations and suggest reasons related to the dissemination of policies that first consider public intervention and then ‘the third way’ of the economy as a way to increase wealth and support economic development. In this context, it should be noted that:

• Modern non-profit organisations (NPOs) take the form of enterprises encouraging the development of capabilities to satisfy human needs in terms of production of goods and utilities.

• A systematic cooperation with the local context (i.e. enterprises and Public Administration) is becoming increasingly more important for the survival and development of NPOs.

• Excellent opportunities for economic and social growth and for mutual development can develop from this type of cooperation.

• Starting from this premise, the purpose of the research is to suggest some insight on the theme of cooperation between for-profit and non-profit world in the light of the thought of Church’s Social Doctrine, and in particular, of the Encyclical Letter of Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate – On Integral Human Development in Charity and Truth. In this sense, the contribution is a conceptual work; the study could improve with empirical research concerning the level of diffusion and the form of collaborations for-profit/non-profit in the Italian context.

Modern non-profit organisations (NPOs) take the form of enterprises encouraging the development of capabilities to satisfy human needs in terms of production of goods and utilities.

A systematic cooperation with the local context (i.e. enterprises and Public Administration) is becoming increasingly more important for the survival and development of NPOs.

Excellent opportunities for economic and social growth and for mutual development can develop from this type of cooperation.

Starting from this premise, the purpose of the research is to suggest some insight on the theme of cooperation between for-profit and non-profit world in the light of the thought of Church’s Social Doctrine, and in particular, of the Encyclical Letter of Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate – On Integral Human Development in Charity and Truth. In this sense, the contribution is a conceptual work; the study could improve with empirical research concerning the level of diffusion and the form of collaborations for-profit/non-profit in the Italian context.

From a methodological point of view, after a literature review on NPOs and corporate social responsibility, the chapter analyses reasons, strategies and tools of collaborations between non-profit and for-profit worlds (the role of Public Administration and hybrid organisation is excluded). Then, focus moves up on Church’s Social Doctrine and Encyclical Letter Caritas in Veritate with particular attention to the topic analysed in this chapter (collaboration for-profit/non-profit enterprises). The vision emerging from the Encyclical is that the dichotomy between for-profit and NPOs should be resolved by striving for the development of a ‘civil economy’ with the capacity to promote the overall development of the human being. The research highlights the importance of dissemination of initiatives promoted predominantly by NPOs, with the objective of stimulating and supporting the implementation of forms of structured collaboration; we are sure that a ‘connection point’ between for-profit and non-profit is now necessary.

Literature on nontraditional firms has focused on behavioral differences with for-profit firms. Less attention has been given to the variations in behavior among nontraditional firms. This chapter examines differences across three types of Uruguayan nonprofit health care organizations.

This chapter draws on a unique dataset of Uruguayan health care organizations during the period 1982–1990, as well as interviews with doctors working in the three types of nonprofits during spring 2010. We use a simple OLS regression to identify differences in average behavior, and differences in reaction to a regulatory change.

The chapter shows that structure of stake holding and governance significantly affect behavior, even where many behaviors are highly regulated.

These findings highlight the importance of specifying governance structure when predicting behavior of nontraditional firms. Empirical tests of behavioral differences between traditional and nontraditional firms will be more meaningful if the governance structure of nontraditional firms is common and specified. A limitation of our study is our inability to control for the timing of degeneration of producer cooperatives. This would be one element of governance structure to consider in future data collection.

These findings highlight the need to avoid drawing broad policy conclusions from the behavior of a specific subset of nontraditional firms.

This chapter highlights the importance of carefully specifying stakeholder and governance structure when predicting behavior of nontraditional firms. It is of interest to anyone using a sample of nontraditional firms to test general hypotheses about their behavior.

Charities in the United States contribute to the public good by delivering a broad range of services and by promoting civic engagement and social change. Though these dual roles are widely acknowledged, a relatively few studies explore advocacy among service-providing nonprofits. Analyzing a random sample of charities in the San Francisco Bay Area, the authors conceptualize nonprofits as institutionally embedded formal organizations and actors. The authors find that a majority of service providers blend advocacy and service provision. Organizational rationalization constructs nonprofits as goal-oriented actors working to benefit their constituents and society at large, increasing the likelihood that nonprofits will embrace advocacy. Moreover, collaboration embeds nonprofits in networks of mobilization and information for advocacy and facilitates engagement in political and social change activities. By contrast, embeddedness in the market is negatively associated with advocacy. These results reinforce the salient role of service-providing nonprofits in collective civic action and demonstrate how nonprofit embeddedness in multiple institutional influences affects engagement in advocacy.

This chapter considers some of the divergent outcomes of youth mobilization and participation in offline spaces, particularly in the youth nonprofit. Critics of youth online political participation detail several shortcomings of online activism as compared to offline activism, but in so doing, these critics venerate offline activism as a utopic alternative. Based on qualitative research in three organizations that mobilize youth around issues of education reform, this chapter demonstrates that the offline youth activist nonprofit fosters political power among some youth while burning out other youth. For teenage activists, these nonprofit organizations offer political education, institutional leverage, and foster political efficacy. At the same time, older youth organizers who are paid staff in these same organizations struggle with having to reign in the radicalism of the youth they mentor, while performing invisible labor around the demands of their organizational funders. These organizational pressures work to burn out youth organizers and steer them away from politics. Online forms of youth activism bring about outcomes that both enhance the political capacities of youth as well as hinder their potential to transform social injustices. Far from utopic, offline movement contexts also foster these contradictory outcomes and should be considered more critically in the debates over the merits of offline versus online activism.

Purpose – During the last decade, several nonprofit governance codes have emerged in Germany and Switzerland. In contrast to the corporate sector, where one code exists in each country, the nonprofit sector has not unified its initiatives on governance guidelines. This research study searches for reasons of this heterogeneity by analyzing the content of the governance codes.Design/methodology/approach – Based on a comparative content analysis of 15 governance codes from Germany and Switzerland, this survey gives some insight about the different range of issues and levels of detail.Findings – The findings report a great variety among the nonprofit governance codes. Three different clusters are defined in order to classify the governance codes regarding their information detailedness. Some codes present the basic principles, others give detailed information on focused subjects, and some others function as soft law with a large scope. Additionally, the kind of the producers does have an influence on the content of nonprofit governance codes.Research limitations/implications – The survey is limited because of its geographically focus. However, several implications for further research can be drawn, that are of international relevance. Better knowledge is necessary about the implementation of the governance codes. Additionally, further influence factors on the content of governance besides the kind of the producers have to be analyzed. Finally, it would be interesting to test the acceptance of the codes and the participation process of development among a larger group of organizations that complies with a governance code.Originality/value – For the first time, a complete list of all nonprofit governance codes in the two countries was conducted as a basis for this study. Former studies used a smaller sample of governance codes without clarifying the reasons for the selection.

Individuals and corporations give generously to nonprofit organizations. However, supporters are naturally concerned about the financial strength and operational efficiency of an organization. Using publicly available nonprofit databases and websites, this case exposes students to a real-world scenario in which students analyze a 501(c)(3) organization of their choosing using GuideStar data and select Better Business Bureau Wise Giving Alliance criteria in five areas: governance and oversight, effectiveness, finances, fundraising and information materials, other financial and non-financial performance measures. The overall learning objective of this case is to enhance students’ understanding of a nonprofit’s financial and non-financial performance through research and analytical procedures. This case helps to fill a void by familiarizing students not only with standard nonprofit financial performance metrics, but also important non-financial areas related to governance, mission-driven goals, and organizational transparency. It also affords students the opportunity to develop a more thorough understanding of key accounting and non-accounting issues associated with nonprofits, which are not always explicitly or implicitly covered in textbooks.

Change in ownership among U.S. community hospitals has been frequent and, not surprisingly, remains an important issue for both researchers and public policy makers. In the past, investor-owned hospitals were long suspected of pursuing financial over other goals, culminating in several reviews that found few differences between for-profit and nonprofit forms (Gray, 1986; Sloan, 2000; Sloan, Picone, Taylor, & Chou, 2001). Nevertheless, continuing to the present day, several states prohibit investor-ownership of community hospitals. Conversions to investor-ownership are only one of six types of ownership change, however, with relatively less attention paid to the other types (e.g., for-profit to nonprofit, public to nonprofit). This study has two parts. We first review the literature on the various types of ownership conversion among community hospitals. This review includes the rate at which conversions occur over time, the relative frequency in conversions between specific ownership categories and the observed effects of conversion on hospital operations (e.g., strategic direction and decision-making processes) and performance (e.g., access, quality, and cost). Overall, we find that the impact of ownership conversion on the different measures is mixed, with slightly greater evidence for positive effects on hospital efficiency. As one explanation for these findings, we suggest that the impact of ownership conversion on hospital performance may be mediated by changes in the hospital's strategic content and process. Such a hypothesis has not been proposed or examined in the literature. To address this gap, we next study the role of strategic reorientation following hospital conversion in a field study. We conceptualize ownership conversion within a strategic adaptation framework, and then analyze the changes in strategy content and process across sixteen hospitals that have undergone ownership conversions from nonprofit to for-profit, public to for-profit, public to nonprofit, and for-profit to nonprofit. The field study findings delineate the strategic paths and processes implemented by new owners post-conversion. We find remarkable similarity in the content of strategies undertaken but differences in the process of strategic decision making associated with different types of ownership changes. We also find three main performance effects: hospitals change ownership for financial reasons, experience increases in revenues and capital investment post-conversion, and pursue labor force reductions post-conversion. Membership in a multi-hospital system, however, may be a major determinant of both strategy content and decision-making process that is confounded with ownership change. That is, ownership conversion may mask the impact of system membership on a hospital's strategic actions. These findings may explain the pattern of performance effects observed in the literature on ownership conversions.

Purpose – this chapter contrasts the ethical climates in government and nonprofit organizations (npos) in japan, a setting where the relationship between these two sectors has been recognized as close and long-lasting (estevez-abe, 2003; hirata, 2002; ritu, 2008). Yet, there has been little comparison of the value difference (or congruence) or discussion of how this may influence their interaction over time. This chapter explains why nonprofit partners may be more attractive partners for governmental contracts, notwithstanding the dangers of “mission drift” (young & denize, 2008) and/or high monitoring costs (malloy & agarwal, 2008).

Design/methodology/approach – Using survey data from matched samples of nonprofits (441, 86% response rate) and governmental organizations (321, 64%), the factor structure equivalence and measurement invariance of ethical climates in these two sectors were rigorously tested.

Findings – The findings extend prior typologies of ethical climate from for-profit and nonprofit organizations to governmental organizations. The chapter revisits the notion of opportunism, which continues to be pervasive and problematic in third-sector studies (Hawkins, Gravier, & Powley, 2011) to suggest that significant overlap in ethical climates between nonprofit and governmental organizations rules out value differences as a possible source of opportunism.

Originality/value – This study contributes a deeper awareness of the similarities and differences in ethical perceptions between nonprofit and governmental organizations that can inform policy makers in government to better understand the implications of using nonprofit partners to deliver services.

The purpose of this article is to develop a nonprofit integrated social accounting (NISA) model that takes into account the particular objectives of nonprofit organizations (achieving their mission and remaining viable as an organization), their specific characteristics (e.g., the engagement of volunteers), and their economic, social and environmental impacts. The conceptual framework includes defining social accounting, setting the boundaries of the reporting entity, identifying the objectives of nonprofit reporting, identifying the users of the accounts and their information needs, and considering the questions that have to be answered in order to know if the organization is achieving its goals. From the conceptual framework, the NISA model is developed, incorporating four elements: (1) economic and human resources; (2) economic, social and environmental value creation; (3) internal systems and processes; and (4) organizational learning, growth and innovation. Overall, the model provides a mechanism to address both functional and strategic accountability concerns of the organization, its effectiveness and efficiency, and to drive behavior through feedback and readjustment. In this way, accounting plays an important role in shaping the ‘reality’ of the organization.