The growing push in nonprofit studies toward panel data necessitates a methodological guide tailored for nonprofit scholars and practitioners. Panel data analysis can be a robust tool in advancing the understanding of causal and/or more nuanced inferences that many nonprofit scholars seek. This study provides a walk-through of the assumptions and common modeling approaches in panel data analysis, as well as an empirical illustration of the models using data from the nonprofit housing sector. In addition, the paper compiles applications of panel data analysis by scholars in leading nonprofit journals for further reference.

While comparative research on nonprofit organizations has made much progress since the launch of the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project in 1990, there now seems to be a loss of momentum. Some of the reasons for this have to do with aspects of definition, classification, and aggregation that can be corrected. The main issue, however, is the lack of progress in advancing comparative nonprofit sector theories beyond the social origins theory. To remedy this, the essay proposes four ways forward as part of a new research agenda.

How does the receipt of public assistance and social insurance relate to charitable giving and volunteering? Using data from the 2017 wave of Panel Study of Income Dynamics in the US, we employ a series of multilevel logistic regressions and tobit models to answer the research question. Results show that the receipt of public assistance and social insurance is not significantly related to volunteering. The receipt of social insurance is also not significantly associated with charitable giving, but the receipt of public assistance has a small, negative relationship with the recipients’ charitable giving. Moreover, how public assistance associates with charitable giving and volunteering varies with different public assistance programs, whereas the relationship between social insurance and charitable giving and volunteering remains insignificant when different social insurance programs are analyzed.

While scholars of management have extensively discussed paradoxes, scholars of volunteer management have given them little systematic attention. This special issue brings together the field of paradox studies with the research field of volunteer management. While many studies highlight paradoxes between different “missions” and mandates within volunteer-involving organizations, this introduction suggests using a “dramaturgical” approach that highlights the interplay between different actors, audiences, instruments for communication and action, and the broader moral, institutional frameworks in which the organizations operate. We review the field of paradox studies in management, then connect it to volunteer management, and then suggest ways that the dramaturgical approaches might help systematize some of the paradoxes that scholars have found in organizations that use volunteers. Next, the introduction summarizes this issue’s articles. Finally, we suggest that paradoxes take a more prominent role in studies of volunteer management.

This paper introduces the special issue focused on Latin America and the Caribbean (LA&C), featuring five papers penned by local authors. Reviewing Voluntas journal's main topics concerning LA&C as grassroots movements within civil society, the third sector including its definitions and institutional context, philanthropy, and volunteer work. After organizing these discussions, we summarize the five papers included in this special issue. We connect these papers with broader debates in the LA&C literature and emphasize their unique contributions. A significant amount of the LA&C research relies on case studies. We advocate for increased usage of local databases to conduct quantitative studies. Furthermore, while most theoretical models use non-local frameworks, we encourage research that presents fresh theoretical viewpoints to enrich the debate.

Social enterprises are recognised as relevant rural development actors. The specific features of social enterprises operating within rural areas (i.e. their relational, socially innovative and multi-stakeholder character and their focus on integrated development) concur with the principles of the neo-endogenous approach to rural development, which stress the potential role of third sector organisations as development actors within governance frameworks. In order to study this phenomenon, that links social enterprises and rural development, we propose a conceptual and methodological framework drawing from Polanyi’s socio-economic theory, complemented with the concepts of place, spatial scale and corporate agency. Through the proposed framework, we advocate for a plural vision of the economy, socio-spatial and geopolitical sensitive concepts and overcoming methodological individualism for the study of an increasingly relevant phenomenon such as the participation of third sector organisations like social enterprises in the (neo-endogenous) development of rural areas.

With the exceptional COVID-19 circumstances in early 2020, public service co-production went through a push towards digitalisation. Using normalisation process theory as the basis for analysis, the article looks at the immediate effects of digitalisation on restorative practices, which is a co-produced approach to delivering justice. A comparative case study conducted in Estonia, Finland, Ireland and Portugal showed that digitalisation meant a more directive role for the mediators and more responsibility for the citizens in organising the service context. The process became more business-like, which put some integral aspects of restorative justice at risk, such as trust building and feeling connected. The launch of digital restorative services depended more on service providers’ readiness to try digital solutions and less on service experience before digitalisation.

The last two decades have seen rapid advancements in data processing, collection, and analysis. While these have offered great opportunities for finding answers to enduring questions, the rise of new technologies for research purposes has raised the question of data neutrality, privacy, and equity. Expansions in data categorization, cleaning, and analysis require a broader understanding of the data collection process and its increased technification also increases the access gap to information. This introductory article focuses on the implications of new techniques and technologies to conduct research on the third sector and the nuances around data representation, equity, and justice in third-sector research. We also aim to identify new opportunities that the digitalization of the third sector has opened for nonprofit research, highlighting key methodological and ethical implications for future studies. We conclude by pushing third sector researchers to have more open discussions about issues of equity, inclusion, and representation in the ways we collect and analyze data.

The article argues that in Denmark during the past 150 years, moral elites have been central in settling paradoxes within social policy by developing ‘classifications’ of citizens and sectors: who are deserving of help and what sector (public or third) should provide care. Contrary to widely held beliefs, historically, there is no logical or practical connection between ‘more deserving’ and ‘state support’. Theoretically, the article integrates elite scholarship and cultural sociology in developing a concept of moral elites’ power from—their sources of moral authority—and power to, the way that they have used their power to classify citizens and sectors. Empirically, the Danish moral elite and its involvement in social policy are analyzed based on secondary as well as primary historical sources. Findings: The development of the Danish moral elite has roots in the administrators of the nineteenth-century absolutist state: the clergy, medical doctors, and lawyers. Educational resources and state affiliation continue to be central to moral elite status. Economists have ascended to the top of the moral elite, while clergymen have dropped out. Three major classifications were developed during the period. ‘Help to self-help’ (late nineteenth century): deserving poor should receive help from private charity, while the public system should deter and discipline. ‘Rights’ (mid-twentieth century): the state should care for all, philanthropy mostly considered stigmatizing. ‘Workfare’ (late twentieth century to present): citizens are considered deserving as long as they are ‘active’, and sectors are considered equal in providing for citizens as long as they reach the economistic goal of activation.

We examine how social and solidarity economy organizations (SSEOs) generate value for female participants and their community. Our theoretical framework pairs a social utility framework with the capability approach, integrating the perspective of feminist economists to capture value of various types. SSEOs can adopt dimensions of social utility in their activities, including solidarity, identity, sustainable economic development, citizenship, and self-governance. Our study connects these dimensions with value, framed by the capability approach. Findings rely on interviews with participants of Projeto ELAS, a program that promotes socio-productive inclusion of low-income mothers. Participants strengthened their ability to aspire, engage with their community, persevere, feel self-efficacious, and be financially sustained through a process of social interaction, positive identity, and financial growth. Our findings highlight the importance of relational processes within SSEOs and open avenues for research that uses a social utility framework to analyze social value and territorial impact by SSEOs.

Successive crisis in Europe have contributed to rethink welfare state and the entrepreneurial role of Third Sector organizations in the provision of community services that progressively have created social enterprises. Its creation is the result of a decision-making process that is collective, not individual, and of a strategic nature, in which the organization's culture plays a relevant role. This work aims to describe and analyze the entrepreneurial process, and the key elements that determines the decision of creating a work insertion social enterprise by its promotor entity. As a result, this article proposes an explicative model of social enterprises creation and makes an empirical validation, using Delphi Method in Spanish work insertion social enterprises case.

Ethnographies involve the exploration of social phenomena in the field, typically for an extended period of time. Traditionally, ethnographers listen to, observe, and directly communicate with the subjects of their research. At its essence, ethnography is about storytelling, and the data are collected through human interaction. With the development of new technologies, and with the plethora of social media platforms, the manner in which many stories are told has become significantly more varied. Accordingly, digital ethnography has emerged as a new approach to conducting ethnographies. In the present study, we focus specifically on the use of digital ethnographies in third sector studies. Building on our own experience using digital ethnography, collecting data from Facebook pages and groups, blogs, and websites of nonprofit organizations and individual volunteers and donors, we describe two different ways of conducting digital ethnography: One, at the micro-level, explores human milk donations to nonprofit milk banks. The second, at the meso-level, explores a community of migrant workers. We aim to outline the potential, limitations, and ethical considerations of this methodology.

Relatively little is known about the Malaysian third sector. This is in large part due to the lack of large-scale data about the organisations that make up the sector, with the last comprehensive investigation nearly 50 years ago (Douglas and Pedersen in Blood, believer, and brother: the development of voluntary associations in Malaysia, 1973). The limited understanding of the make-up of the sector creates difficulties in policy development and resource allocation. For the first time, we combine the organisational databases of seven different regulators to map the Malaysian third sector, classifying organisations according to the International Classification for Non-Profit Organisations. We produce a map of the Malaysian third sector, describing its constituents, activities and beneficiaries. Our results show a sector cross-cut with ethnicity and religion, and we reflect on the implications both for the development of third sector organisations in Malaysia and for how current nonprofit theories adequately describe third sectors in non-western contexts.

Integrating non-profit organizations (NPOs) and the services they provide into development planning highlights an aspect of government–NPOs relationship that frames NPOs as drivers of development. In South Africa, even though NPOs are typically regarded as private owned organizations, the nature of the services they provide in various policy fields has implications for socio-economic development. However, the development planning process is currently, more public and business sector oriented. Using a qualitative research approach, the findings suggest that non-profit services can be integrated into development planning through the processes of Reality Adjustment, Strategic Engagement, Sector Mapping and Pro-activism.

The international debate of the shifting bases of philanthropy suggested by modernization theory has been ongoing since the beginning of the twenty-first century, yet empirical evidence remains lacking from the perspective of philanthropic motivation. The society and philanthropy of China have undergone tremendous transformation since the launch of Reform and Opening Up in 1978, providing an ideal context for testing the assumption of the shifting bases of philanthropy. Through investigating the motivation structure of collectivism and individualism behind individual giving in contemporary China, this study rejects the assumption drawing on the data from the China Labor-force Dynamics Survey (CLDS). This study helps deepen the understanding of culture’s roles during modernization. It also has important implications for how charitable giving can be effectively promoted both inside and outside of the context of China.

Our goal is to outline the concept of communal labor in ecovillages of Brazil. To do that, we considered three elements: (1) political orientation for self-sufficiency; (2) technical-productive orientation in self-managed work and in plural economic practices; and (3) socio-environmental orientation centered on the recovery of biodiversity. We collected data in four ecovillages for 49 days, through a methodological path of inspiration ethnography with fieldnote and participant observation, followed by remote monitoring for 22 months. Our option was for flexible procedure to collect complex dynamics of management and routines of life by dialogues between researchers and informants. The results show that communal labor emerged in ecovillages as a resistance to market-centric society, although dependent on it incidentally. If, on the one hand, there are tensions and contradictions, on the other they reveal a strong organizational practice that shows possibilities and ways of redefining the relationships among human beings, and between collective organizations and ecosystems, by mitigating elements of alienation on values that inspire human emancipation.