Suchergebnisse

The field of nonprofit and voluntary action (NVA) studies in the United States originates in the 1970s and has since grown to encompass multiple scholarly associations around the world and graduate degree programs producing faculty with NVA as their primary scholarly focus. This article introduces readers to the NVA field by describing the development of the field, its scholarly associations and publication venues, and education programs. The second section discusses three areas of foundational research: why nonprofit organizations exist, why people give, and nonprofit relations with government. Each of these areas can be drawn upon by public policy scholars to more fully understand how individuals and nonprofit organizations participate in the policy process. The final section identifies three nexuses with policy process: policy design, advocacy, and the role of foundations. These are three areas that have significant potential for research collaborations to connect NVA with policy process literature.

Club goods with information asymmetry are frequently provided through mixed economies of for‐profit, nonprofit, and public providers. Theory explaining mixed economies relies on sector to classify providers based on assumptions that sector‐level differences in how organizations either distribute or reinvest profit will affect behavior. However, this classification is overly broad and is not able to adequately capture the diversity of providers of these types of goods. The author utilizes the Institutional Analysis and Development framework to identify six "governance structures" in the for‐profit and nonprofit sectors. Governance structures are constitutional‐choice level rule variations in who has the power to make rules. I argue that there are two types of power that affect rules: (1) concentration of constitutional‐choice level decision‐making power (i.e., how many principals) and (2) proximity of monitoring and enforcement of those rules. The extent to which the constitutional rules actually guide service delivery outcomes depends on a nested rule environment. Only if there is consistency across three level of rules (constitutional, collective, and operational) can we connect sector to outcomes. The empirical reality of service delivery, particularly for club goods with information asymmetry, is far too complex for simplistic assumptions linking profit distribution or its reinvestment to outcomes. This article directs further research toward building contingent theory, with if/then conditions, based on empirical research.

The question of relevance and the production of usable knowledge for practice has been a foremost concern for the field of nonprofit studies since the early years of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA). Exploring the research of nonprofit scholars from 2000 to 2010, this research note examines the following overarching question: How well do authors in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly ( NVSQ) explore the practice implications of their research? We find that more work needs to be done in improving the applicability of our research for practice, while recognizing that some work is geared toward the advancement of basic knowledge in the field of nonprofit studies. We adopt the position that scholars engaging in research with direct relevance for practice should invest in supporting praxis, investing a portion of their writing in addressing the "so what" question for both scholars and practitioners.

Elinor "Lin" Ostrom, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics, spent her career developing ideas and tools to address the concept of governance—what Oliver Williamson describes as the "provision of good order and workable arrangements." Nonprofit and Voluntary Action (NVA) scholars are similarly concerned with good order and workable arrangements but draw on different, if not more disparate, scholarly traditions. This special issue sheds light on the promise that integration of the tools developed by Ostrom and NVA scholarship holds. In this article, including its primer appendix, we provide a broad introduction to the tools created by Lin and her collaborators at The Ostrom Workshop (the "Workshop") in the interest of exploring their utility for NVA scholars' central questions.

To mark the 50th anniversary of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA), this article reviews the association's history, from its 1971 founding by a small group of scholars interested in voluntary action to the current association of more than 1,000 members who study a broad range of nonprofit, civil society, voluntary action, and philanthropic topics. To inform the history, we recorded oral histories and reviewed the ARNOVA collection of historical records at the Ruth Lilly Archives and internal files provided by ARNOVA. Our article is divided into three important junctures of change: 1971–1989, the founding period; 1990–2006, the golden era of philanthropic support; and 2007–2020, a maturing field and strategic directions. Through our analysis, we identify recurring themes and tensions and how ARNOVA navigated through a changing environment and growing field. We conclude the article with forward-looking questions.

This article discusses the challenges of better connecting public administration (PA) scholarship to practice and recommends solutions to address those challenges in three areas-engaged scholarship, engaged teaching, and engaged faculty. To strengthen the connection between research and practice, strategies are proposed such as publishing summaries of research, creating open access online journals, establishing learning communities, and developing a new journal for cutting-edge PA research that is written in a practitioner accessible format Strategies for linking our teaching to practice include emphasizing problem-based learning techniques, utilizing executive education programs to test the relevancy of our scholarship and incorporating additional pedagogical training into our doctoral programs. As a strategy for promoting more engaged faculty, we encourage greater participation in academic-practitioner exchange programs. In order for PA faculty to be more engaged, changes to tenure and promotion expectations are also needed, as well as an expansion of institutional incentives for engaged scholarship. Adapted from the source document.