Decoupling Under Scrutiny: Consistency of Managerial Talk and Action in the Age of Nonprofit Accountability

2021 ◽  
pp. 089976402199524
Author(s):  
Christof Brandtner
Keyword(s):  
Nonprofit Organizations ◽  
Metropolitan Area ◽  
Text Analysis ◽  
General Public ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Nonprofit Sector ◽  
Managerial Practices ◽  
Automated Text Analysis ◽  
Nonprofit Accountability ◽  
Age Of Accountability

Decoupling theory suggests inconsistencies in what nonprofits do and what they claim to do. Accountability is a potential antidote to such inconsistencies in the nonprofit sector. To test whether different features of accountability prevent decoupling, I examine the divergence in statements about managerialism among nonprofit organizations in a major U.S. metropolitan area. The analysis compares a survey of organizations to public discourse based on five-million-word website text. Professionalism and evaluation indeed prevent organizations from embellishing their discourse. However, inconsistencies between managerial practices and managerial discourse remain frequent: Organizations continue to present symbolic displays of managerialism to the general public, particularly when their missions are tangible. Furthermore, ratings generate inconsistencies by leading organizations to downplay managerial practices. This study develops an institutional understanding of managerial talk and action, shows that the problem of decoupling in the “age of accountability” is multifaceted, and has implications for the estimation of nonprofit practices using automated text analysis.

Economic Way of Thought and Legislationon Nonprofit Organizations

2012 ◽  
pp. 48-63
Author(s):  
L. Yakobson
Keyword(s):  
Nonprofit Organizations ◽  
Empirical Data ◽  
Nonprofit Sector ◽  
Social Medium ◽  
The State ◽  
Rapid Changes ◽  
Comparative Advantages ◽  
Essential Prerequisite

The article considers proper legislation as an essential prerequisite for actualization of NPOs comparative advantages. Restrictions imposed on NPOs are reasonable if they are compensated by benefits from greater trust. The rigidity of constrains and requirements should be optimized while accounting for peculiarities of a social medium, the state of the nonprofit sector, and the governments readiness to encourage the development of the latter. As empirical data suggests, Russian NPOs being on different stages of maturity need separate legal treatment. In the meanwhile, interests that prevail in the NPOs community are not always conducive to rapid changes.

The Role of Nonprofit Sector Networks as Mechanisms for Immigrant Political Participation

2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luisa Veronis
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
Nonprofit Organizations ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Multiple Scales ◽  
Nonprofit Sector ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Immigrant Community ◽  
Immigrant Political Incorporation

Issues of immigrant political incorporation and transnational politics have drawn increased interest among migration scholars. This paper contributes to debates in this field by examining the role of networks, partnerships and collaborations of immigrant community organizations as mechanisms for immigrant political participation both locally and transnationally. These issues are addressed through an ethnographic study of the Hispanic Development Council, an umbrella advocacy organization representing settlement agencies serving Latin American immigrants in Toronto, Canada. Analysis of HDC’s three sets of networks (at the community, city and transnational levels) from a geographic and relational approach demonstrates the potentials and limits of nonprofit sector partnerships as mechanisms and concrete spaces for immigrant mobilization, empowerment, and social action in a context of neoliberal governance. It is argued that a combination of partnerships with a range of both state and non-state actors and at multiple scales can be significant in enabling nonprofit organizations to advance the interests of immigrant, minority and disadvantaged communities.

Asian American Nonprofit Organizations in U.S. Metropolitan Areas

2005 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chikan Richard Hung
Keyword(s):  
Nonprofit Organizations ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Public Interest ◽  
Community Organizing ◽  
Metropolitan Areas ◽  
Nonprofit Sector ◽  
Central Cities ◽  
Cultural Organizations ◽  
Related Information ◽  
Cultural Service

This article analyzes the characteristics of Asian American nonprofit organizations in major U.S. metropolitan areas. The data are based on internet archives of nonprofit organization Form 990 and related information. Asian American nonprofits are less than 20 years old on average. They remain a relatively small part of the nonprofit sector. Religious organizations are generally the largest group among Asian American nonprofits, followed by cultural organizations, service agencies, and public interest associations of similar proportions. Asian American secular organizations as a group tend to be younger, are more likely to be in central cities, in wealthy and poor communities, as well as in metropolitan areas with a more homogenous Asian ethnic population and a relatively more active general population in community organizing. The opposite is true for religious Asian American organizations. The pattern is less consistent among Asian American cultural, service, and public interest organizations. Regarding organization size, more established Asian American nonprofits, Pan Asian American organizations, and those agencies located in communities with larger Asian American population have more total assets and annual revenue.

China's Newsmakers: Official Media Coverage and Political Shifts in the Xi Jinping Era

2017 ◽  
Vol 233 ◽  
pp. 111-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyle Jaros ◽  
Jennifer Pan
Keyword(s):  
Text Analysis ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Past Research ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Xi Jinping ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Party Organizations ◽  
Automated Text Analysis ◽  
The Media ◽  
Party Dominance

AbstractXi Jinping's rise to power in late 2012 brought immediate political realignments in China, but the extent of these shifts has remained unclear. In this paper, we evaluate whether the perceived changes associated with Xi Jinping's ascent – increased personalization of power, centralization of authority, Party dominance and anti-Western sentiment – were reflected in the content of provincial-level official media. As past research makes clear, media in China have strong signalling functions, and media coverage patterns can reveal which actors are up and down in politics. Applying innovations in automated text analysis to nearly two million newspaper articles published between 2011 and 2014, we identify and tabulate the individuals and organizations appearing in official media coverage in order to help characterize political shifts in the early years of Xi Jinping's leadership. We find substantively mixed and regionally varied trends in the media coverage of political actors, qualifying the prevailing picture of China's “new normal.” Provincial media coverage reflects increases in the personalization and centralization of political authority, but we find a drop in the media profile of Party organizations and see uneven declines in the media profile of foreign actors. More generally, we highlight marked variation across provinces in coverage trends.

ARNOVA's Symposium on Public Policy for Nonprofits

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Jeavons
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Nonprofit Organizations ◽  
Nonprofit Sector ◽  
Federal State ◽  
Voluntary Organizations ◽  
Public Charities ◽  
State And Local ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Local Levels

There are serious gaps in our knowledge and understanding of how public policy at the federal, state, and local levels affects the work of a wide array of nonprofit organizations. On October 4th and 5th, 2010, the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Organizations (ARNOVA), with the support and encouragement of the Bill and Melinda Gates, Kresge and C.S. Mott foundations, convened a group of thirty nonprofit scholars and leaders to explore what we know about the impact of public policy on the nonprofit sector. The conference focused on how public policy helps or harms the ability of nonprofit organizations, particularly but not exclusively public charities, to fulfill their missions.

Summaries

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Text Analysis ◽  
English Language ◽  
Automated Analysis ◽  
Supervised Machine Learning ◽  
Automated Text Analysis ◽  
Research Problems ◽  
Dutch Language ◽  
Automated Methods

Damian Trilling & Jelle Boumans Automated analysis of Dutch language-based texts. An overview and research agenda While automated methods of content analysis are increasingly popular in today’s communication research, these methods have hardly been adopted by communication scholars studying texts in Dutch. This essay offers an overview of the possibilities and current limitations of automated text analysis approaches in the context of the Dutch language. Particularly in dictionary-based approaches, research is far less prolific as research on the English language. We divide the most common types of content-analytical research questions into three categories: 1) research problems for which automated methods ought to be used, 2) research problems for which automated methods could be used, and 3) research problems for which automated methods (currently) cannot be used. Finally, we give suggestions for the advancement of automated text analysis approaches for Dutch texts. Keywords: automated content analysis, Dutch, dictionaries, supervised machine learning, unsupervised machine learning

scholarly journals Increasing the Size of the Pie: The Impact of Crowding on Nonprofit Sector Resources

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 211-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erynn Beaton ◽  
Hyunseok Hwang
Keyword(s):  
Nonprofit Organizations ◽  
Fixed Effects ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Nonprofit Sector ◽  
Financial Resources ◽  
Limited Resources ◽  
Barriers To Entry ◽  
Human Services Organizations ◽  
Nonprofit Competition ◽  
The Impact

AbstractThe number of nonprofit organizations is rapidly increasing, which has led nonprofit practitioners to complain of funding scarcity, nonprofit scholars to closely study nonprofit competition, and policymakers to consider increasing nonprofit barriers to entry. Underlying each of these perspectives is an assumption of limited financial resources. We empirically examine this assumption using county-level panel data on nonprofit human services organizations from the National Center for Charitable Statistics. Contrary to the limited resources assumption, our fixed-effects models show that increasing nonprofit density, at its current levels, has the effect of increasing sector financial resources in each county. We suggest that these findings prompt a tradeoff for policymakers. A sector with free market entry results in a nonprofit sector with more, smaller nonprofits, but such a sector may have the capacity to serve more people because it has more total sector financial resources. Conversely, a sector with higher barriers to entry would translate to a sector with fewer, larger nonprofits with less overall capacity due to fewer sector financial resources.

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