The concept of legitimacy—i.e., being regarded as “lawful, admissible, and justified” (Edwards in NGO rights and responsibilities: a new deal for global governance, The Foreign Policy Center, London, 2000)—is pivotal within civil society research. Recently, the concept has applied to wider notions concerning the civil sphere and civic action. The introductory article of this special issue aims to provide an overview of conceptualizations of legitimacy within civil society research and to point at new avenues for future research. We depart from Suddaby et al.’s (Acad Manag Ann 11(1):451–478, 2017) configurations of legitimacy within management literature: as property, perception, and process. While these configurations are also reflected in civil society literature, with legitimacy as property being prominent, they do not capture the full scope of civil society literature on legitimacy, given its multidisciplinary nature, its inclusion of multiple levels of analysis, and the presence of complementary conceptualizations of legitimacy. We posit that the legitimacy-as-relations-in-processes perspective is valuable for advancing research in civil society organizations.

In this introductory essay to the special issue on civil society in authoritarian and hybrid regimes, we review core themes in the growing literature on shrinking or closing space for civil society. We discuss the role of civil society organizations (CSOs) as agents of democratization and note the emergence of dual, at times apparently conflicting policy postures within authoritarian regimes (restriction and repression for some CSOs vs. financial support and opportunities for collaboration for others). We posit that different conceptual perspectives applied to civil society can help account for the duality of authoritarian postures and examine repercussions for three key subgroups of CSOs: claims-making (or advocacy) NGOs, nonprofit service providers and regime-loyal NGOs supporting often populist and nationalist discourses.

This article investigates the implications of the move from public administration to new public management to new public governance for relations between the state and non-profit organizations using the example of the development of policy hubs and innovation laboratories under the operational theory of deliverology. Much of the literature suggests that the move towards these collaborative arrangements is providing non-profits with more access and influence in the policy process. Another stream suggests that the changes may be less significant and less positive than assumed for non-profits. This article weighs in with a preliminary examination of policy hubs and innovation laboratories in Canada. It confirms that while collaborative arrangements between the two sectors are expanding and increasingly drawing non-profit actors into the centre of policy-making, non-profit organizations may be wise to heed certain cautions when choosing their partners and terms of the partnerships or they may find their ability to create and influence policy in a meaningful way is limited.

Food banks are a particular type of voluntary sector organization that bridges the government sector, private sector, and civil society. This special issue of Voluntas adds to the stream of research on the role of food banks in addressing food insecurity in high-income countries. We begin by outlining the concept of food insecurity and a number of direct responses to alleviating food insecurity at the household and individual level by governments and the voluntary sector. We then look at the potential and limitations of food banks in addressing food insecurity in high-income countries, distinguishing between anti-hunger research and research framed as addressing community food security. Based on the set of seven papers included in this special issue, we call for further research that bridges both these approaches.

Most of the extant studies on social enterprises have taken a static view of institutional complexity and assumed conflict between social and market logics as given. In this study, by taking a dynamic perspective and examining the conflict between social and professional logics, we examine the process of their hybridization and how institutional complexity evolves as they grow and professionalize. Based on our study of a hospital in India, we find that social enterprises operating in highly professionalized fields pass through phases of hybridization and professionals play a crucial role as carriers of alternative logics to social enterprises.

Scholarship on boundary crossing in organizations typically focuses on endogenous strategic decisions to broaden audiences and resource pools, rarely capturing exogenous shocks that initiate the process. Yet, rapid social change can also drive organizations to cross boundaries. Boundary crossing or adopting the issues, causes, and claims of other groups can lead organizations to reconfigure, returning to core questions determined during their founding about the problems they seek to address and who belongs in the group. In doing so, organizational trajectories change, producing lasting transformations or leading to disbanding. This study uses multi-sited participant observation and interviewing to examine the influence of Black Lives Matter on two social movement organizations, analyzing the internal organizational processes that determined and defined boundary crossing and the divergent outcomes for the participating organizations. This study is one of the first to depict the internal experience of interacting across movement boundaries.

Food banks have become the first line of response to problems of hunger and food insecurity in affluent nations. Although originating in the USA, food banks are now well established in Canada, Australia, and some Nordic countries, and they have rapidly expanded in the UK and other parts of Europe in the past two decades. Defined by the mobilization of food donations and volunteer labor within communities to provide food to those in need, food banks are undeniably a response to food insecurity, but their relevance to this problem is rarely assessed. We drew on data from the 2008 Canadian Household Panel Survey Pilot to assess the relationship between food bank use and household food insecurity over the prior 12 months and examine the interrelation between food-insecure households’ use of other resource augmentation strategies and their use of food banks. We found that most food-insecure households delayed bill payments and sought financial help from friends and family, but only 21.1% used food banks. Food bank users appeared to be more desperate: They had substantially lower incomes than food-insecure households who did not use food banks and were more likely to seek help from relatives and friends and other community agencies. Our findings challenge the current emphasis on food charity as a response to household food insecurity. Measures are needed to address the underlying causes of household food insecurity.

This paper, based on a primary sample survey over 1925 earning individuals in the cities of Kolkata, Cuttack and Bengaluru, examines how the individual and household characteristics influence the acts of giving in urban India. The regression results indicate income, family size and property ownership affecting likelihood and extent of giving. Likelihood to give is more with females, though males tend to donate more. There exists threshold income beyond which likelihood to donate is less. Characteristics like age, education, dependency ratio and marital status influence certain acts of giving. As the opportunity cost of non-cash giving increases with the rise in income, cash donations substitute non-cash giving. There also prevails complementarity in the acts of giving. On behavioral front, in addition to work–life balance and pledging, the notion of rational choice seems to be gaining ground.

To cope with the new challenges inherent to their political role, civil society organizations must convince their stakeholders about their legitimacy, and meta-organizations (MOs) appear to play a central role in such a context (Ahrne and Brunsson in Scand J Manag 21(4):429–449, 2005; Bonfils in Scand J Disabil Res 13(1):37–51, 2011). In this paper, we aim to better understand the legitimating processes of a specific kind of MOs—namely civil society MOs (CSMOs)—considering that CSMOs feature some characteristics that reinforce both internal and external legitimacy issues. Our research is based on an in-depth case study of a French national federation (Fédération Addiction) formed by the merger of two former federations originating in different fields, alcoholism treatment and drug addiction professionals. We confirm the importance of stakeholders’ representativeness in the governance of MOs and especially in multi-stakeholders CSMOs, and we corroborate the assertion that MOs closely relate to categorization-related issues and the categorization process itself in many ways: the legitimacy and the potential for action of MOs depend on the socially perceived appropriateness of the delimitation of the field that they claim to represent, and at the same time categorization is reinforced by the creation of MOs. We contribute to the current literature on MOs in two main ways. First, we show how a change in the relevant categorization may result from the dual and interacting actions of the MOs themselves and public authorities. Second, our case study illustrates how a restructuring of the MOs landscape may strengthen the salience of internal legitimacy issues federative actors are confronted with in order to maintain their representativeness and position in the expanded organizational field. In this dynamic context, external and internal legitimating processes appear closely intricate, and categorization and governance issues appear strongly interrelated.

Social enterprises have gained wide recognition as a tool for solving social and environmental problems. They generate new opportunities in the social sphere, while being active in the commercial field. They are hybrid organizations that face many challenges when pursuing frequently conflicting goals. Social enterprises are therefore an expression of the possibility of different institutional logics coexisting as part of the same organization. Social enterprises running a commercial activity and using business-like practices legitimize the market logic, while the social goal of their operation is consistent with the logic of social welfare. Although there an intense discussion takes place in the literature on institutional logics that may affect nonprofits’ activity as hybrid organizations, so far the topic has been empirically verified only to a limited extent. The aim of this article is to examine the successful coexistence of the market logic and the social-welfare logic in NGOs acting as social enterprises. On the basis of a representative national survey of 3800 NGOs, including 412 carrying out market sales and thereby referred to as social enterprises, a one-factor analysis of variance was carried out. The obtained findings of the study indicate that social enterprises acting as non-governmental organizations successfully combine the market and the social-welfare logics.

Community-based hybrid nonprofits, defined as organizations that combine social services with organizing or advocacy, play a crucial role at the neighborhood level. Considering their nonconformity to conventional organizational forms, they face specific challenges and advantages in achieving their combined advocacy and service mission. Using neo-institutional theory to provide context to our data, this qualitative study of 18 nonprofits working in one neighborhood examines how hybrid nonprofits are categorized as well as processes for legitimacy for these organizations. We find that at the neighborhood level, hybrid nonprofits are identified as “grassroots” by both hybrids and non-hybrids alike and draw on this “grassroots” identity to achieve legitimacy. We examine the settings for this “grassroots” legitimacy and its challenges and conditions. Through cultivating a better understanding of community-based hybrid nonprofits, this study adds to the literature on how nonprofits provide services and organize at the neighborhood level.

Few would underestimate the role of nondemocratic governments in controlling and steering NGOs. However, this article highlights that in hybrid regimes, the rules for NGO–government and interorganizational relations are not simply dictated from above but actively shaped and sustained by NGOs themselves. Building on data from two policy fields in competitive authoritarian Armenia, this article illustrates that the government sent ambiguous signals to NGOs, thereby cultivating divisions between them. It then shows that, surprisingly, NGOs themselves amplified these divisions. They did so by (1) avoiding confrontation with the government, (2) claiming ownership of their own policy initiatives or ties to government, and (3) distancing themselves from other NGOs. The article explains this behavior by focusing on the institutional environment and perceived uncertainty. In view of a worldwide trend toward increasingly contradictory policy environments for civil society, the approach and findings of this article are of relevance beyond Armenia and beyond competitive authoritarian regimes.

This study provides insight into the changing normative judgements of civil society organizations over time through the concept of legitimacy. A case study of an LGBT organization in Ireland over the past 40 years shows how a process of legitimation took place in five steps: refuge, advocacy, formalization, impact, and organizational survival. The initial stigmatization of the organization’s core purpose created opportunities for social capital to grow, which, ironically, helped to initiate the process of legitimation. In the end, pragmatic legitimacy waned after the organization achieved impact and was successful in its mission. This organizational perspective on civil society and on a history of LGBT rights contributes to understanding the legitimacy of civil society organizations, actors which influence change in normative judgements over time. Treating legitimacy as both a property and a process highlights how these organizations can be simultaneously subjects of normative judgement and also agents of change.

Mainstream enterprises function by alleviating the cognitive burdens on their members and hence generating an insensitivity to all those complex environmental factors, in which they critically depend. By focusing on the political, institutional dynamics, the present article dwells on the questions of: How can social enterprises regain the embeddedness to the political, institutional environment and how can this process quest the dominant, institutional closure? To address these questions, the article introduces a synergy between new institutionalism and systems theory, both macro-sociological approaches that can compensate for each other’s deficiencies. In this context, the hybrid concept of institutional entrepreneurship describes the institutionalization of new organizational forms via the embeddedness of the institutional logics that underpin them. An in-depth qualitative research of the OTELO social enterprise and of its institutional framework of Mühlviertel was conducted. Empirical evidence shows that social entrepreneurship can regain the institutionally sustainability by becoming embedded to the fields of legitimacy, politics and discourse, and through this process dispute the broader institutional closeness.

Civil society in Gramscian conception is an arena of hegemonic contestations and therefore essentially political. Development is also a political process inasmuch as it involves power in the allocation of resources and values. Yet, some African states as elsewhere globally, attempt to create and reproduce a legal–policy environment that favours an ‘apolitical’ ‘development’-oriented civil society while disabling those perceived ‘political’. This article argues the state–civil society relationship ambivalence is a product of competing visions of what constitutes ‘politics’ and ‘development’ and their governmentalities. Drawing on existing literature, primary interviews and media articles, the paper attempts to bring into conversation discourses on the political and development roles of civil society and how these have shaped state–civil society relationships from colonial period to the present day Kenya. Reflecting on manifestations of assumed role dichotomy and implications for state–civil society relations, the paper argues that the dual roles are complimentary and mutually reinforcing. The dual roles have also resulted in multiple relationships between state and civil society.

The work of non-profit organisations (NPOs) in non-democratic country contexts tends to be judged on their contribution to the democratisation process rather than the activities they undertake.This neglects the potential impact NPOs have on societies within such contexts. In this study, we highlight that NPOs can influence public policy deployment in the Russian Federation even if they cannot affect public policy itself. By operationalising the very restrictions placed upon them, NPOs use their relationships with the state to effect change within their immediate environment and scope of their operational remit, even if they cannot hold authorities to account or influence policy development. The key to this is strong organising capabilities and engagement with the Russian public. We reflect on the implications of our findings to the understanding of civil society development and NPOs in Russia and in other similar non-democratic contexts.

Food banks have grown substantially in Canada since the 1980s but little is known about patterns or predictors of engagement including frequency or duration of service use. This study examined food bank program data from a large food bank organization in Vancouver, Canada, finding that between January 1992 and June 2017, at least 116,963 individuals made over 2 million food bank visits. The majority of members were engaged for a short time and came for relatively few visits, but 9% of members engaged in longer-term episodic or ongoing usage over several years, accounting for 65% of all visits. Results from cluster and regression analyses found that documented health and mobility challenges, larger household size, primary income source, and older age were predictors of higher frequency and duration of service usage. Findings add to growing critical examinations of the “emergency food system” highlighting the need for better understanding of the broader social policies influencing food bank use.

The paper presents research findings on the initial stages of the life cycle of cross-sector partnerships in the social services. The findings clearly show the importance and impact of the initial stages on the establishment and institutionalization of the partnerships over time. These stages are mainly characterized by clarifying the common goals of the partnership, mobilizing support to achieve the goals, overcoming resistance and relieving fears while convincing opponents to change their attitudes toward the partnership, and formalizing and constructing administrative processes and procedures. Special attention is given to the emotional energy that the management and workers invest in the initial stages in order to overcome barriers as well as ideological, cultural, and procedural gaps between the partner organizations. The relationships between selected organizational properties that typify the initial stages of cross-sector partnerships and the achievement of goals and outcomes are presented, analyzed, and discussed.

Human services nonprofits increasingly provide a social safety net through interorganizational collaboration, and the effectiveness of these partnerships has important implications for the quality and sufficiency of those services. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether partner selection is related to partnership effectiveness and, if so, how. More specifically, the study examines the impact of partner selection on partnership effectiveness and the mediating roles of trust and communication in that relationship. Based on surveys on 201 voluntary human services nonprofit partnerships, trust, and communicative effectiveness are related to satisfaction with partnership outcomes. Trust and communicative effectiveness fully mediated the effects of prior experience and reputation on partnership effectiveness and communication. Interestingly and contrary to some findings from previous research, resource complementarity, homophily, and social networks across organizations’ members, as partner selection factors, were not found to be related to partnership effectiveness. We derived implications for partnership effectiveness research from the results.

This paper reviews recent work on community asset transfers (CAT): a transfer of management of facilities from the public sector to the third sector, largely led by volunteers. The emergence of CATs is placed in the context of the development of community organisations and their relation to the state. Transfer has been stimulated by cuts in local government budgets since 2010. The review focusses on leisure facilities because these are non-statutory and so more vulnerable to cuts in public expenditure. The experience of CATs is reviewed, including: the motivations of local government and volunteers; the transfer process and management of CATs post-transfer; and the market position of facility types. The methodological approaches and theoretical frameworks used in research are contrasted; in particular, how these have balanced agency and structure in analysing a contested neoliberalist discourse. The practicalities of research in this area are considered before concluding with research questions.