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Nonprofit performance measurement is receiving increasing academic and practitioner attention, but the design of nonprofit measurement systems has received limited consideration. This is in contrast to the well‐established body of knowledge that focuses on performance measurement in private and public sector organisations. The purpose of this paper is to ascertain whether this body of knowledge can be used to inform the design of nonprofit performance measurement systems.

A case study approach was taken to examine the performance measurement practices used in six nonprofit organisations and their associated funders and regulators. A total of 24 managers from 18 organisations took part in the study.

The study found underdeveloped and resource intensive performance measurement systems in the majority of organisations that were examined. The performance measurement literature from the private and public sectors advocates the development of relevant, balanced, integrated, strategic and improvement‐oriented performance measurement systems; concepts that have received limited consideration in the nonprofit literature. This research found that performance measurement system design principles developed for the private and public sectors were applicable to the nonprofit sector.

Whilst a range of stakeholders was included in the research, further work is required to validate the applicability of the findings to the diverse nonprofit sector. Nevertheless, given the dearth of operations management focused research on nonprofit performance measurement systems this study makes a useful contribution.

The study presents empirical evidence of the myriad criteria and processes that are used to measure nonprofit performance. The paper shows that current measurement practice is detracting from the performance of nonprofit organisations.

Despite the perceived uniqueness of the nonprofit sector, this paper shows that learning from the private and public sectors can be used to inform good practice in nonprofits. As relatively little research has been done in this area, the findings make a valuable contribution to the body of knowledge.

Recent literature on nonprofit boards of directors has extensively investigated the composition, role, responsibilities, and characteristics of boards. Given the growing number of studies on nonprofit boards, which added new impulse to the debate on the role and characteristics of these players, it is time to analyze the state of the art and systematize the current knowledge. On the other hand, despite the presence of some literature reviews, a research comparing the debate among the nonprofit, private, and public sectors is still lacking. Using Gabrielsson and Huse’s (2004) framework, we wanted to identify factors that can influence research on nonprofit boards and compare our results with existing studies on private and public sector.

We conduct a systematic literature review, selecting empirical articles published in international scientific journals from 1992 to 2012.

We found similarities and differences in relation to research on boards among sectors. As a common result, we found that evolutionary studies still remains a neglected area in all of three realms. Finally, whereas input–output studies prevail in the private sector and contingency studies prevail in the public sector, behavioral studies prevail in the nonprofit sector, demonstrating, also, that the sector itself can make a difference in the board’s research.

This literature review provides some suggestion for further research on boards for all of three sectors. For example, we suggest complementing research on boards on all three sectors, especially in relation to evolutionary studies.

This paper fills the need to clarify the status of research on nonprofit boards, in order to address scholars in the understanding of the phenomenon.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors influencing the decision of managers to work in the nonprofit sector and how these choices are shaped by intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Additionally, this research examines the impact of job choice motivation on social, community and professional outcomes and the unique characteristics of managers in the nonprofit sector.

This research employed data from the National Administrative Studies Project (NASP-III) survey, which measured the mid- and upper-level managers working in nonprofit organizations in Illinois and Georgia. The survey measured the manager’s perceptions of various organizational issues, including work motivation, mentoring and communication, career histories, hiring practices, and organizational cultures and structures. The data were then analyzed using a hierarchical regression model.

The findings of this research support the idea that intrinsic motivation is an important aspect of job choice motivation for individuals in the nonprofit workforce. In addition, the findings suggest other characteristics, including policies that enhance work life balance (WLB), advancement, and job security, are important to understand the job choice motivations of nonprofit managers. This research also found not all types of nonprofit agencies attract similarly motivated individuals, or lead to equivalent community outcomes.

The organizations represented in the NASP III sample included more membership and professional associations than the overall nonprofit sector. This over representation partially limits the generalizability of these findings but it also allows the research to more thoroughly understand this unique subset of organizations that serve predominantly the narrow interests of their members.

This research highlights the advantage nonprofit employers have over other organizations in terms of using intrinsic motivations to attract employees. However, the findings also suggest nonprofit organizations need to focus on human resource (HR) strategies including policies that enhance WLB, advancement, and job security to compete with other employers for talent. Finally, the research also suggests the need to tailor HR strategies to groups of nonprofit employees based upon important employee characteristics such as gender, job type, and prior career experience.

This study extends a well-developed body of knowledge on motivations and selection of career paths to individuals working in the nonprofit sector. It also suggests variations among employees and organizations matter in terms of the type of individuals attracted to particular career path in nonprofits. Additionally, this research suggests future research needs to include more nuanced examinations of the differences which exist among organizations in the nonprofit sector rather than simply focussing upon similarities across the most prevalent types of nonprofit organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine changes in accountability as the provision and control of education moved from private nonprofit organisations to a public sector provider.

Analysis of nineteenth century archival documents from significant primary educational providers in a major early New Zealand settlement.

The nonprofit education provider utilised public meetings including public examinations, whose effect was to develop trust based on the education values it shared with its community of stakeholders. It also published financial reports which, along with inspections and statistical returns, were preferred once the government became the education provider. Such publications and inspections indicated bureaucracy and control. Nevertheless, government funding, rather than the nonprofit organisation’s dependence on its community, made education provision sustainable.

It has been suggested that the differences between public sector and private sector accounting and accountability are not always sharply defined (Carnegie and Napier, 2012). However, this case study shows that a change of education provider did lead to a marked difference in accountability. While theory suggests that public sector accountability should enhance democracy, the party best meeting this brief was the nonprofit provider, with the public sector provider preferring hierarchical accountability. It could be argued that funding dependence drove these different approaches as community accountability was traded for financial security.

Distinctive study of accountability practices to external stakeholders, in a mid-nineteenth century education context.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors that affect a person's choice to work in a specific sector to understand the overrepresentation of women in the nonprofit sector in the USA.

This study views a sector choice of prime-age salaried workers as a three-way choice among for-profit, nonprofit, and public sectors. One's choice of employment sector in this study depends on extrinsic and intrinsic motivations, and is also shaped by structural factors. These benefits, in turn, tend to be determined by individual characteristics. Consequently, this study estimated the endogenous switching regression of earnings and sector choice.

Results from 2003 to 2007 Current Population Survey (CPS) September supplement data indicate that the so-called “feminine” industries are concentrated in the nonprofit sector, and this gendered industry structure attributes to women's overrepresentation in the sector. The results also suggest that women with more education and experience may choose nonprofit jobs over jobs in the other sector while nonprofit employment is generally associated with negative wage differentials.

This study does not model employers’ behaviors while gender segregation and discriminatory hiring practices may have contributed to women's overrepresentation in the nonprofit sector due to the lack of employer-side information in CPS. Consequently, the estimation of sector choice without employer information is likely to suffer from an endogeneity problem.

This study highlights the factors affecting the concentration of women in the nonprofit sector. Nonprofit organizations may use the information to better understand their employees.

The findings suggest that women's sector choice is largely embedded in the industry structure of the nonprofit sector.

This study examines a sector choice of prime-age salaried workers as a three way choice, instead of a binary choice, among for-profit, nonprofit, and public sectors, which reflects the reality better. Further, this study contributes to the literature on nonprofit employment by testing the impact of nonprofit status on an individual's earnings. Lastly, this study contribute to understanding women's overrepresentation in the nonprofit sector by examining both the structural and utilitarian aspects of sector choice.

Public administration scholarship has yielded important insights about the extent to which government bureaucracies function as representative institutions. While evidence suggests women and minorities fare better in obtaining higher level positions within government versus the private sector, much less is known about the career trajectories in the third sector. The rise of nonprofit employment has been attributed to widespread government contracting, resulting in a model of government-nonprofit relationships described as complementary and mutually beneficial. Since both are “public-serving,” government and nonprofits share many values. Representative bureaucracy represents one such common value. This article explores the capacity of nonprofit organizations in furthering the aims of representative bureaucracy, and proposes a research agenda for the comparative study of public and nonprofit employment

Studies of multi-sector collaborations have increased in recent years. However, the topic is still complex and lacks synthesis. Toward that end, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how collaboration is addressed in the public administration and nonprofit sector journals, and applies well-established strategic decision-making theories to shed light on possible research directions that would provide rigor to the field of collaboration.

The authors conduct a literature review of the top nonprofit and public administration journals, believing these most likely to contain articles on the topic of multi-sector collaboration.

The authors identify a number of themes, including need for clarity, temporality, call to collaborate, funding, partnering issues and processes, benefits of collaboration across three different collaborative types.

The authors embed well-known strategic decision-making theories into the themes emergent from this review and offer suggestions as to how future researchers may test strategic decision-making processes within multi-sector collaborations.

Take the word “research,” combine it with the words “experiences around hair,” and you inevitably get a personal story. Whether it’s concerns about too much hair, complaints about one’s lack of hair, or the ability of hair to intimidate or convey authority, questions related to hair appear to provoke passionate responses in the form of narratives. The authors believed “hair” stories would provide a unique method for examining employment realities in nonprofit and public sector workplaces. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Attendees at the 2009 Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA) conference were invited to a symposium discussing what “hair” might indicate about the lived experiences of individuals employed in nonprofit and public sector workplaces. A participatory action research methodology was used to engage 24 academics and practitioners in structured small group conversations about workplace hair-related image management issues. A storytelling framework was used to guide the content analysis of the 305 narratives generated by two focus groups.

The interview questions were literal ones, yet the responses that were elicited were figurative. As the process unfolded, it became clear the focus group participants had to tell their own individual stories, in their own way, before they could answer the research questions. Hence, the storytelling dimension became a critical component of this research as a vehicle for conveying the power behind what may have initially appeared to be a simple set of questions and answers.

Selection bias in this study was unavoidable, given the voluntary nature of participation and the transparency of the study’s purpose. Given the chosen research approach, the project findings may also lack generalizability. However, since the so-called “subjects” of the investigation are the same persons found in sector workplaces, there is no way to avoid this limitation in any related assessment.

This project allowed for a new understanding of how the direct and literal approach often used by social scientists to investigate the impact of attitudes and perceptions on social outcomes might best be replaced or augmented by methods that uncover the ways in which subjects frame the effects under examination within the context of their personal experiences.

One’s appearance takes on professional and, often, political ramifications whether the individuals involved desire this or not. Ironically, one’s ability to appear more casual may be one of the benefits of working in the nonprofit or public sectors as a means of connecting to constituents and stakeholders. However, given the need to serve multiple and competing audiences, this ability to identify and connect with others may have unintended consequences that may not be experienced in the private sector, where stakeholders may have a more unified set of goals.

This project focused on a relatively under-researched audience and subject: hair and image management. Each day, individuals make a choice about their appearance, which includes their hair. For those working in the nonprofit and public sectors, especially women and people of color, there appear to be implicit areas of concern that manifest themselves in the workplace, many of which were identified through this research.

The balanced scorecard (BSC) and intellectual capital (IC) concepts are two strategic management methods that help to identify and elevate organizations' intellectual resources in the knowledge economy. However, very little research has examined the usefulness of the BSC and IC concept in nonprofit organizations. This paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper uses a critical analysis of current literature in relation to BSC and IC concepts within the social service nonprofit context.

The findings suggest that BSC is less effective in social service nonprofit organizations (SSNPOs) because the model's strategy, cause‐and‐effect relationships and its four linked perspectives are incompatible to the unique social service nonprofit environment. IC, however, can be harnessed to co‐ordinate with the values and core character of SSNPOs.

The paper contributes a new dimension to the body of literature; raising critical questions as to the usefulness of the BSC in SSNPOs and theoretically arguing that IC is an alternative strategic management framework in the social service nonprofit sub‐sector. The increased awareness of the IC concept in SSNPOs, as a result of this paper, likely generates further research from both nonprofit practitioners and scholars.

The paper is considered as a starting point and serves as a milestone in applying IC as a strategic management conceptual framework in the nonprofit sector. Also, the paper informs nonprofit leaders that IC is a more appropriate strategic management concept in the nonprofit sector.

This study aims to use the original data collected from school board members representing nonprofit charter schools in the state of Minnesota to examine the relationship between the distribution of board-executive governance responsibilities and the performance of organizations operating as part of a New Public Management style macro-governance reform.

A combination of survey data collected from Minnesota charter school board members and hard performance data were utilized in two OLS regression models to predict the link between organizational governance and school performance.

The authors find that boards can improve hard measures of organizational performance by shifting responsibility of day-to-day operations closer to the executive, and public advocacy duties closer to the board. The results build on the existing literatures on school board governance and board-executive relations. Overall, the findings suggest the existence of an ideal balance between board-executive governance responsibilities in key functional areas on charter school boards.

Though a healthy literature exists regarding the value of charter schools, very few studies have actually explored the way in which these organizations are governed. This study is the first to link charter board governance responsibilities to performance.