Search results

This chapter is an effort to make sense of the complexities emerging from the tension between my academic-self and activist-self in the case of my participant observation in a small community organization which I call free food store. By drawing from my experiences at the ‘free food store’, I do not only reflect on some specific moments where my multiple roles/selves clash, but also invite my readers to reimagine and build an activist academy that works along with communities to ‘change the world’. While this piece can be considered as an ongoing and intense dialogue between the activist and academic about ‘what is to be done?’ in a neoliberal world, it is also an attempt to think, write and, more importantly, act differently through embodied experiences, aspirations and imaginations.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to present a new business model called the Retained Earnings Maximizing (REM) Nonprofit Enterprise. Specifically, the chapter details the nature of the REM enterprise's motivation, organizational control, market interaction with other firms, and obstacles to the growth for the REM enterprise. Additionally, the chapter outlines a research agenda for experimental and empirical inquiries into nonprofit organizations and the REM enterprise.

Methodology – This chapter utilizes standard industrial organization theory in a nonmathematical approach to explaining the nature of the REM enterprise.

Findings – The chapter seeks to establish the business model of the REM. By inquiring into the nature of the REM enterprise, the chapter provides the basis for future research.

Research Limitations – The research was limited in terms of potential case studies because this is a new business model that is being proposed.

Practical Implications – The chapter could have large practical implications for increased and more consistent revenues to philanthropic organizations. Since writing the chapter, we tried to implement our own REM business model in an on campus coffee shop. Other ventures are being established in a similar vein.

Value of the Chapter – The adoption of the L3C legal structure by a handful of states demonstrates the desire to establish new business models with charitable ends. Likewise, the REM business model hopes to increase levels of philanthropy while spurring innovative thought about the Independent Sector which has been underrepresented in economic research.

Purpose: Entrepreneurial teams are one of the most crystallized forms of collaboration in the generically collective dynamics underpinning social entrepreneurship. Despite their quantitative prevalence, social entrepreneurial teams (SETs) remain quite absent from the scholarly literature. This chapter aims to develop a research agenda addressing this gap. Methodology/Approach: This chapter first reviews the scarce literature dealing with this subject and develops an operationalizable definition of SETs. Next, it confronts current knowledge on entrepreneurial teams with the specific context of social entrepreneurship to introduce and discuss main topics of investigation on SETs. Findings: Six topics are suggested to have a high potential for developing knowledge on SETs: formation, size and extended team, gender, decision-making and leadership, identity, and turnover. Research Implications: This chapter frames these research avenues within a developmental stages perspective with the aim to contribute to help form and maintain effective SETs. Originality/Value of Chapter: This research has implications for scholars as it defines SETs as a distinct object for research, which allows extending knowledge on collaborative dynamics in social entrepreneurship, but also on entrepreneurial teams in general. The suggested research agenda and its orientation toward the development of effective SETs should be a springboard for future research on this subject.

In the 1970s and 1980s, studies of the unpaid household and family labor of upper-class women linked this labor to class reproduction. In recent years, however, the topic of class has dropped out of analyses of unpaid labor, and such labor has been ignored in recent studies of elites. In this chapter, drawing primarily on 18 in-depth interviews with wealthy New York stay-at-home mothers, we look at what elite women’s unpaid labor consists of, highlighting previously untheorized consumption and lifestyle work; ask what it reproduces; and analyze how women themselves interpret and represent it. In the current historical moment, elite women face not only the cultural expectation that they will work for pay, but also the prominence of meritocracy as a mechanism of class legitimation in a diversified upper class. In this context, we argue, elite women’s unpaid labor serves to reproduce “meritocratic” dispositions of children rather than closed, homogenous elite communities, as identified in previous studies. Our respondents struggle to frame their activities as legitimate and productive work. In doing so, they not only resist longstanding stereotypes of “ladies who lunch” but also seek to justify and normalize their own class privileges, thus reproducing the same hegemonic discourses of work and worth that stigmatize their unpaid work.

The burnout, stress, and work-life balance challenges faced by teachers have received renewed interest due to the myriad disruptions and changes to K-12 schooling brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. Even prior to the pandemic, relatively little was known about teachers' time use outside of the classroom, the blurring of work and home boundaries, and how teachers compare to similar professionals in these regards. We use daily time-diary data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) for 3,168 teachers and 1,886 professionals in similarly prosocial occupations from 2003 to 2019 to examine occupational differences in time use. Compared to observationally similar non-teachers, teachers spend significantly more time volunteering at their workplace and completing work outside the workplace during the school year. On average, teachers spend 19 more minutes working outside of the workplace on weekdays than observably similar non-teachers and 38 more minutes on weekends. The weekend disparity is particularly large among secondary school teachers. This suggests that before the widespread switch to online and hybrid learning necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers were already navigating blurrier work-life boundaries than their counterparts in similar professions. This has important implications for teacher turnover and for the effectiveness and wellness of teachers who remain in the profession.

There are different types of non-profit organisations (NPOs) characterised by the different extents of their volunteer management practices. In addition, the use of volunteer work measurement tools is infrequent among these organisations, especially in contexts where NPOs face no obligations or standard practices in this area, such as in Italy. The literature has stated that volunteer programmes and activities are effective if a NPO is highly structured and employs good volunteer management practices and that the measurement of volunteer work may increase the effectiveness of such programmes; this is frequent, for instance, in US NPOs. However, what would occur if a NPO introduces the measurement of volunteer work in a context where volunteer management is not highly structured, such as in Italy?

To study this topic, we adopt the quasi-experimental approach to examine six Italian voluntary organisations (VOs) based in Abruzzo. The treatment consists of the gradual introduction of volunteer work measurement tools to the managers and volunteers who work for the selected organisations, as well as the observation of the early impact of this treatment on the effectiveness of volunteer programmes and activities. This paper aims to discuss the issue of the implementation of measurement tools for effectively managing volunteer services in two different contexts: Italian and US NPOs.

Our findings have practical implications, especially with regard to the management of relatively unstructured volunteer organisations that would like to introduce new tools of measurement but do not have the necessary skills to do so. We also wish to show in this work how some organisations are implementing these tools and highlight the initial effects produced by this implementation process.

This study is innovative, particularly for contexts in which there are no obligations and customs with regard to the measurement of volunteer work.

Volunteerism underpins the sustainability of communities and a wide range of organizations. A review of the academic literature on volunteerism yields few studies considering the role of emotions, but those that do exist clearly indicate that emotions are critical factors in the recruitment, retention, and wellbeing of volunteers. The contribution of this chapter is to provide a review of the existing published academic research on emotions in the context of volunteerism, and to put out a call for emotions research in this critical aspect of sustainable communities and organizations.

Drawing on Bourdieu's field, habitus, and capital, I show how disparate experiences and “dispositions” shaped several departments’ development in the organization behind the annual Burning Man event. Observations and interviews with organizers and members indicated that in departments with hierarchical professional norms or total institution-like conditions, members privileged their capital over others’ capital to enhance their authority and departmental solidarity. For another department, the availability of multiple practices in their field fostered disagreement, forcing members to articulate stances. These comparisons uncover conditions that exacerbate conflicts over authority and show how members use different types of capital to augment their authority.

The following ethnographic study was conducted to better understand the site-specific, qualitative impact of organizational, taken-for-granted assumptions and practices regarding gender and family life in the reproduction of on-the-ground gender inequality. More specifically, this case study considers the consequences of organizational assumptions consistent with Bem’s (1993) three “lenses of gender” – androcentrism, essentialism, and polarization – on direct service provision for homeless clients in a small, faith-based, social service provider.

Interview and participant-observation data were gathered during time spent volunteering with Integrity Intervention (pseudonym): a small liberal Methodist outreach ministry for the homeless. Data collection was guided by the following question: How do Integrity Intervention’s cultural models (or “schemas”) for gender and family life shape the ways the organization becomes a gendered social space?

I find that expectations for client behavior were deeply gendered, in a manner consistent with the “lenses of gender.” Additionally, normative expectations for subordinate masculinities were also informed and crosscut by race and class marginalization. Ultimately, my findings suggest that the “lenses of gender” may be imbued with class and race-specific interpretive meaning. I delineate forms of site-specific gendered, racialized, and classed cultural schemata for understanding poverty and homelessness, and explain how they ultimately work together to preclude inclusive and gender-equitable service provision.

This study is limited to providers and participants in one particular nonprofit organization.

The conclusions of the study bear implications for understanding the various forms through which gender inequality is reproduced – particularly in settings of faith-based social service provision.

Resource constraints in the Canadian publicly funded healthcare system have created a need for more volunteer leaders to effectively manage other volunteers. Self-concept theory has been conceptualized and applied within a volunteer context, and the views of healthcare stakeholders, such as volunteers, volunteer leaders, and supervisors, triangulated to form an understanding of the attitudes and behaviors of volunteer leaders. We propose that leaders are differentiated from others by how they view their roles in the organization and their ability to make a difference in these roles. This interpretation can be informed by self-concept theory because each individual's notion of self-concept influences how employees see themselves, how they react to experiences, and how they allow these experiences to shape their motivation. A small case study profiles a volunteer leader self-concept that includes a proactive, learning-oriented attitude, capitalizing on significant prior work experience to fulfill a sense of obligation to the institution and its patients, and demands a high level of respect from paid employees.