Introduction to the 50th Anniversary Special Issue

The Process

The planning and organization of the Special Issue took more than 3 years. Upon receiving approval from the ARNOVA Board of Directors in November 2019, we first reached out to the members of our Editorial Board for advice. After discussing different options to attract high-quality papers from a diversity of scholars internationally, we agreed that the call for papers should be an open one so that we could be as inclusive as possible of voices (across disciplines, cultures, career stages, etc.).

In March 2020, we issued an international open Call for Proposals. The coverage was broad, as we were looking for papers that would provide an overview of the evolution of an “important” topic in the nonprofit/philanthropy/civil society field, discussion of key debates, critique of theory relevant to it, assessment of the state of empirical research, and directions for future research. We also welcomed original new conceptual approaches or empirical contributions. A preference was that each article would have a global perspective and be co-authored by scholars from two or more countries; in addition, we encouraged established scholars to work with emerging ones.

Authors from many countries and regions responded to our Call, producing 46 submissions. These were reviewed by the NVSQ Editors and the NVSQ 50th Anniversary Issue Advisory Panel, a panel of eight comprising NVSQ Editorial Board Members and ARNOVA members across disciplines, geographic regions, and methodological backgrounds. The review process was deliberative and intensive, and resulted in invitations to 15 author teams to submit full manuscripts. An Authors’ Workshop was held virtually across three 2-hr sessions in November 2020 in which authors shared draft papers and received feedback from peers and NVSQ Editors.

Full submissions were due in January 2021, and all 15 papers went through the normal blind review process. The manuscripts address philanthropy, nonprofit management and governance, volunteering, and civil society across a range of perspectives. Eleven of the papers were eventually accepted for publication in this Special Issue.

Introducing Articles in the Special Volume

This Special Issue aims to capture key aspects of the field’s history, trends, and key debates and to provide a prospective view for future inquiry. The issue begins with an editors’ reflection article titled “NVSQ: The First Fifty, and Beyond.” In this article, Susan Phillips, Angela Bies, and Chao Guo, working with all the former and current NVSQ editors, present the “inside story” of how editors responded to, managed, or influenced the scholarship being produced and published in this journal. This article is unique in that it is not a systematic review of the literature or objective historical research but rather a subjective personal account undertaken as a shared endeavor by all the editorial teams that assesses how our emerging field and NVSQ co-evolved. While the quality of the journal is fundamentally dependent on the quality of research submitted to and published in it, the editors are important stewards of this scholarly publication process. For an emerging, evolving, and interdisciplinary field such as ours, this role is especially sensitive, as the editors have a professional responsibility to make sure our published work represents well the diversity, vibrance, and relevance of the field. What were their unique accomplishments and challenges, and what were the opportunities and pitfalls? This article answers these questions by “walking” with the editors “down their memory lanes.”

In the article that follows, Brenda Bushouse, Gregory Witkowski, and Alan Abramson review the history of ARNOVA, to which NVSQ belongs. The authors trace ARNOVA’s history, from its 1971 founding by a small group of scholars interested in voluntary action to the current association of approximately 1,200 members who study a broad range of nonprofit, civil society, voluntary action, and philanthropic topics. They recorded oral histories and reviewed the ARNOVA collection of historical records at the Ruth Lilly Archives and internal files provided by ARNOVA. The authors divide ARNOVA’s 50 years of history into three periods: 1971–1989, the founding period; 1990–2006, the golden era of philanthropic support; and 2007–2020, a maturing field and strategic directions. Across all three periods, the authors carefully document how ARNOVA, despite its fragility, navigated through an ever-changing environment and continued to grow. This historical analysis has demonstrated the central role of ARNOVA in building an emerging, interdisciplinary field of nonprofit and voluntary research. One important takeaway is that ARNOVA is shifting from a field-building to a field-improving organization: this shift calls for new possibilities, such as increasing journal outlets for nonprofit research and advocating for a more diverse and inclusive field.

The next group of articles focuses on the state of nonprofit research. The first, “Disciplinary contributions to nonprofit studies: A 20-year empirical mapping of journals publishing nonprofit research and journal citations by nonprofit scholars,” by Megan LePere-Schloop and Rebecca Nesbit, provides a bibliometric analysis of nonprofit research published between 1999 and 2019, in the three core nonprofit journals—NVSQ, Nonprofit Management & Leadership (NML), and Voluntas—and across a wide range of other journals. The authors seek to understand which journals, across social science disciplines, inform nonprofit research by (a) publishing articles, (b) citing the three core journals, or (c) being cited in these core journals. Lepere-Schloop and Nesbit find that nonprofit research published in economics and social sciences journals has kept pace with the big increase in indexed research. At the same time, although the core nonprofit journals have been increasingly engaged with business and management and public administration journals in terms of citing each other’s work, there is significantly less engagement with other social science disciplines. Based on these findings, the authors make several recommendations on how to further increase the visibility of the core nonprofit journals and their penetration into other disciplines. Among other things, they call upon nonprofit scholars to write papers that translate research across fields and disciplines; they also suggest writing deep, robust literature reviews.

The second article in this group, by Peter Schubert, Robert Ressler, Laurie Paarlberg, and Silke Boenigk, offers a refreshing perspective on the evolution of the field of nonprofit research: that of emerging scholars. Applying a mixed-methods design, the authors conduct two studies. Study 1 compares the topics, theories, and methods in dissertations of nonprofit scholars from 2015 to 2020 (n = 3,023) to those published in journals by emerging nonprofit scholars a few years later (n = 390). Study 2 surveyed emerging nonprofit scholars (n = 141) to determine how forces operating within the academic system influence early career research. Results from Study 1 show a significantly lower level of diversity in journal articles compared with doctoral dissertations; for example, while critical theory represents one of the most popular lenses in doctoral dissertations, it is not as well reflected in journal articles. Results from Study 2 reveal challenges experienced in the early career stage, such as tremendous publication and job market pressures. To retain and reinforce the relevance and vitality of nonprofit research, the authors call for further efforts to achieve diversity, both in terms of research approaches and the composition of our scholarly community.

The complementary article, “The Promise and Perils of Comparing Nonprofit Data Across Borders,” by Elizabeth Searing, Nathan Grasse, and Alasdair Rutherford, takes a deeper dive into the subject of comparative nonprofit research. Considering the explosive growth of comparative work in nonprofit research, Searing, Grasse, and Rutherford remind us that comparative empirical research requires comparable data, but that the complexity of comparative data deserves further attention. To this end, they present a useful framework for understanding the influence of institutional contexts on the data used for nonprofit research. They illustrate the framework by discussing three extended examples: the definition of nonprofit, the concept of governance, and the definition of financial liability. In each example, they clearly demonstrate how three institutional forces—government laws and regulations, industry standards and regulations, and social norms—influence the data used in nonprofit research. This historical-institutional approach provides a thoughtful path for careful empirical work as well as the route to theoretical improvements.

The next set of articles considers the intersections of the nonprofit, government, and business sectors. “Beyond the Partnership Paradigm: Toward an Extended Typology of Government/Nonprofit Relationship Patterns” by Stefan Toepler, Annette Zimmer, Katja Levy, and Christian Fröhlich examines nonprofit/government relations in the context of both the partnership literature on collaboration and the closing space literature on repression. Following the Weberian ideal-type approach, the authors integrate foundational conceptions of Salamon, Young, and Najam to develop a heuristic tool for nuanced comparative analyses of relations between the sectors that is applicable in diverse political regime settings. They then apply this framework to Russia and China. While repression may not be the predominant characteristic of nonprofit–government relations in authoritarian regime settings, the reduction of intersectoral relations to collaboration strategies common in Western contexts falls short of capturing the full complexity of such relationships. Rather than trying to establish national patterns, researchers need to remain sensitive to the coexistence of multiple government/nonprofit relationship types affecting various parts of the nonprofit sector differently.

Next, in “Conceptualizing Organizational Advocacy Across the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector: Goals, Tactics, and Motivation,” Jennifer Mosley, David Suárez, and Hokyu Hwang take a closer look at an important aspect of nonprofit/government relations, nonprofit advocacy. Taking as their point of departure the observation that advocacy is an organizational activity and not an organizational form, Mosley, Suárez, and Hwang present a framework and mapping strategy that brings together three major dimensions of nonprofit organizational advocacy—goals, tactics, and motivations—which are visually presented as a cube. Rather than treating each dimension as a dichotomy and activities on each end of a dimension as mutually exclusive, they consider each dimension as a spectrum, recognizing that many advocacy activities span and move across the dimensions. This integrative framework contributes to the literature by accommodating diverse advocacy activities and incorporating not just the advocacy work of advocacy organizations but also that of organizations where advocacy is secondary to their mission (e.g., human service organizations, foundations). This framework opens up possibilities for new areas of comparative research.

The third article in the group, “The (R)evolution of the Social Entrepreneurship Concept: A Critical Historical Review,” by Simon Teasdale, Enrico Bellazzecca, Anne de Bruin, and Michael J. Roy, explores how conceptualizations of social entrepreneurship have emerged and shifted over time. The authors do so through a critical historical review focusing on the most highly cited social entrepreneurship articles in each of five time periods over the last 30 years. They identify four thematic areas characteristic of each period—conceptualization, theoretical approaches, data, and social change outcomes—allowing us to map the terrain of social entrepreneurship scholarship over time. They demonstrate how patterns emerge across these themes over time and situate the analysis within broader developments in the field. It is worth noting that Teasdale and colleagues made a significant decision at the outset of their study to exclude “social enterprise” in their keyword search. While recognizing social enterprise and social entrepreneurship as related concepts, they, nonetheless, argue that social enterprise (and other concepts such as civic entrepreneurship or earned income) are not central to an inclusive framing of social entrepreneurship.

The internal operations of nonprofit organizations, notably governance, accountability, and impact, are the focus of the final group of articles. In “The Evolution of Nonprofit Governance Research: Reflections, Insights, and Next Steps,” David Renz, William Brown, and Fredrik Andersson provide a domain-based narrative review of the research on nonprofit governance and how it has evolved over the last half century. After a summary of the history of nonprofit governance research, Renz, Brown, and Andersson present a multidimensional framework for understanding and categorizing the range and breadth of the field’s literature. They then conduct a Delphi study to get a collective sense of what those engaged in nonprofit governance research perceive as the most important, promising, or innovative topics for future research. The most significant categories for future research that emerge from the responses are diversity, equity, and inclusion in nonprofit governance; nonprofit governance under conditions of disruption/crisis; governance of collaboratives, networks, alliances; alternative models of nonprofit governance; and relationship of nonprofit governance to organizational performance and effectiveness. They conclude their study with a set of their own recommendations for future directions for this field.

Cassandra Chapman, Matthew Hornsey, Nicole Gillespie, and Steve Lockey then explore the unsavory side of nonprofit governance through an analysis of nonprofit scandals. Their systematic literature review presents both quantitative and qualitative syntheses of 71 articles on nonprofit scandals. Based on this review, Chapman and colleagues propose a conceptual model theorizing the causes and consequences of scandals, as well as how nonprofits can best prevent and respond to organizational transgressions. They then offer a research agenda that elaborates upon five key factors that are particularly important for understanding nonprofit scandals but remain understudied: (a) integrity versus competence violations, (b) moral licensing, (c) the multilevel nature of organizational transgressions, (d) sectoral causes of scandal, and (e) effective responses. They close with recommendations for nonprofit leaders on how to conceptualize, prevent, plan for, and address transgressions and scandals occurring within their organizations.

Impact is often seen as the “Holy Grail” of nonprofit work, but with quite different perspectives on how to achieve it. In “Nonprofit Organizations and the Evaluation of Social Impact: A Research Program to Advance Theory and Practice,” Lehn Benjamin, Alnoor Ebrahim, and Mary Kay Gugerty propose a research program to advance theory and practice of evaluation and social impact by nonprofits. By bringing nonprofit scholarship into a conversation with evaluation scholarship, they advance a meso-level theory of nonprofit evaluation that recognizes the diverse ways nonprofits contribute to social change, and they propose a research program that aims to support nonprofit leaders and scholars in productively engaging evaluation. Such a research program is timely as evaluation becomes increasingly institutionalized in the sector in ways that constrain nonprofit leaders from engaging productively with evaluation to advance their social impact. Centered on the practical dilemmas facing nonprofit leaders, their proposed research program answers four key evaluation questions: what to evaluate, for what purpose, using which criteria, and with what evidence and methods. With this research program, Benjamin, Ebrahim, and Gugerty reopen the possibilities for how scholarship can support nonprofit leaders in engaging evaluation to maximize social impact.

The special issue concludes with a conceptual piece focusing on volunteering, one of the two key prosocial behaviors that serve as the foundation of the nonprofit sector and that reflects the journal’s initial focus on voluntary action. In “Rethinking Volunteering as a Natural-Resource: A Conceptual Typology,” Stephanie A. Koolen-Maas, Lucas Meijs, Philine van Overbeeke, and Jeffrey Brudney revisit a metaphor two of the authors proposed over a decade ago: that volunteering is “a human-made, renewable resource”. As a renewal resource, volunteering can be grown and recycled, and its volume and continuation can be influenced by human beings in both positive and negative ways. This article extends the original metaphor and breaks down the monolithic concept of volunteering into three resource types: traditional (akin to wild salmon), third party (such as farmed fish), and spontaneous (marine zooplankton). Each volunteer resource manifests in particular forms of volunteer service, and serves different purposes, although these resources interact and are dynamic and fluid. Each has different antecedents and is harvested in different ways by different stakeholders meeting different conditions. Each type of volunteering requires a specific form of management based on its distinctive benefits and challenges, propagation methods, and sustainability needs. The distinction of three volunteer resources and their dynamics extends the conceptualization of volunteering as a natural resource and informs a new research agenda.

Taken together, the articles that form this special issue represent well the breadth and depth of the collective intellectual knowledge accumulated over the past five decades. Due to the open nature of our Call for Papers, some topics are missing from our collection. In particular, the important topics of charitable giving and philanthropy and of nonprofit and philanthropic pedagogy are absent. As one editorial board member thoughtfully pointed out, “As a field of academic study and credentialing, at the founding of JVAR [the original name of the NVSQ], the pedagogy of our field was not even a twinkle in the eyes of our field’s founders.” As the articles in this anniversary issue illustrate, NVSQ has over the past 50 years been instrumental in supporting research and education in nonprofit and philanthropic studies. As the field and the journal continue to evolve, greater introspection of how scholarship has influenced pedagogy in degree programs, professional practice, and public policy—and vice versa—is a welcome future article.

With this overview, we present to you NVSQ’s 50th Anniversary Special Issue and hope that readers will find these articles as interesting, compelling, useful, and inspiring as we do. Let the reading begin! And may the scholarship and the community continue to flourish!