In a wired world, how do social interactions among organizations and people continue to define civil society? Our co-produced approach to studying civil societies through a place-based, organizational lens provides fresh answers to perennial questions about voice, accountability, and embeddedness…
How do civic organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area straddle the paradox of challenging entrenched inequalities in an ostensibly progressive region that has been transformed by tech-driven wealth? Local nonprofits face the tension of maintaining access to elite resources while building connections to distribute those resources and navigate divides between the haves and have-nots…
Diverse national and cross-national studies have documented “nonprofit sector effects”—demonstrating that aggregate measures of the size and scope of the nonprofit sector (e.g., density, total number, total linkages) in a community have a substantively meaningful influence on outcomes such as violent crime, drug overdoses, happiness, and corporate social responsibility…
How do formal civic organizations shape—and how are they shaped by—the making and transformation of urban space? Place-oriented civil society research emphasizes the central role of civic organizations in producing and changing unequal political and economic orders of cities but largely ignores the intercity connections and competitions that contribute to these local civic dynamics in a global capitalist system…
Funding and service provision are fundamental tenets of nonprofit organizations in Singapore. The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged the resilience of the nonprofit sector and beckoned the government to respond with digitalization programs that blend into the innovative capacity of the nonprofit sector…
In this essay, we explore the institutional embeddedness of the Sydney nonprofit sector via its changing relations with the state, market, and civil society. We explore the historical development of these relations and how these durable relations have shifted in recent years, putting pressures on the sector…
Social origins theory explains variation between civil societies by power relations between socioeconomic classes and by path dependencies. There have been few systematic reflections on which dimensions of civil society depend on these factors and can thus be explained by the theory. With the help of a historical narrative of the eventful history of Vienna’s civil society, in which traditional, liberal, social democratic, statist, and corporatist patterns feature, we tentatively identify ten such dimensions…
Zheng, Wenjuan. 2023. “Converting Donation to Transaction: How Platform Capitalism Exploits Relational Labor in Non-Profit Fundraising”. Online first at Socio-Economic Review.
Brandtner, Christof. 2022. “Green American City: Civic Capacity and the Distributed Adoption of Urban Innovations”. American Journal of Sociology, 128(3): 627-679.
Organizational Supererogation and the Transformation of Nonprofit Accountability
Horvath, Aaron. (2022). “Organizational supererogation and the transformation of nonprofit accountability.” Forthcoming at American Journal of Sociology
Brandtner, C. and Laryea, K. 2022. “Street smarts and org charts: Professional expertise and the production of urban integration.” Working paper. Pre-print available on SocArXiV.
Logue, D., & Grimes, M. G. (2022). Living up to the hype: how new ventures manage the resource and liability of future-oriented visions within the nascent market of impact investing. Academy of Management Journal
Logue, D., & Grimes, M. (2022). Platforms for the people: Enabling civic crowdfunding through the cultivation of institutional infrastructure. Strategic Management Journal, 43(3), 663-693.
Mosley, Jennifer E., David F Suárez, and Hokyu Hwang. 2022. Accepted. “Conceptualizing Organizational Advocacy Across the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector: Goals, Tactics and Motivation.” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 50th anniversary issue.
Wei Luo, Wenjuan Zheng, Yan Long, Relational Work and its Pitfalls: Nonprofits’ Participation in Government-Sponsored Voluntary Accreditation, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 2022
Brandtner, C. and Bromley, P. 2021. “Neoliberal governance, evaluations, and the rise of win–win ideology in corporate responsibility discourse, 1960–2010.” Socio-Economic Review: 1–28.
Brandtner, C. 2021. “Decoupling under scrutiny: Consistency of managerial talk and action in the age of nonprofit accountability.” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 50(5): 1053–78.
Brandtner, C., Bettencourt, L. M. A., Berman, M. G and Stier, A. J. 2021. “Creatures of the state? Metropolitan counties compensated for state inaction in initial U.S. response to COVID-19 pandemic.” PLOS ONE 16(2): e0246249.
Brandtner, C. and Suárez, D. 2020. “The structure of city action: Collaborative governance and sustainability practices in U.S. cities.” American Review of Public Administration: 1–18.
Hwang, Hokyu, and Jeannette A. Colyvas. 2020. “Ontology, Levels of Society, and Degrees of Generality: Theorizing Actors as Abstractions in Institutional Theory.” Academy of Management Review, 45(3): 570-595.
Suárez, David F, and Hokyu Hwang. 2020. “Collaborations and Networks.” Pp. 317-334 in Routledge Companion to Nonprofit Management. Edited by Helmut K. Anheier and Stefan Toepler. Routledge.
Hwang, Hokyu, and David Suárez. 2019. “Beyond Service Provision: Advocacy and the Construction of Nonprofits as Organizational Actors.”Research in the Sociology of Organizations 58: 87-109.
Hwang, Hokyu, Jeannette A. Colyvas, and Gili S. Drori. 2019. “The proliferation and profusion of actors in institutional theory.” Research in the Sociology of Organizations 58: 3-20.
Achim Oberg, Valeska Korff, and Walter W. Powell, “Culture and Connectivity Intertwined: Visualizing Organizational Fields as Relational Structures and Meaning Systems,” Pp. 1-31 in Structure, Content and Meaning of Organizational Networks, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 53: 1-31, 2017.
Valeska Korff, Achim Oberg, and Walter W. Powell, “Governing the Crossroads: Interstitial Communities and the Fate of Nonprofit Evaluation.” Ch. 6 in Networked Governance: New Research Perspectives, edited by B. Hollstein, W. Matiaske and K. Schnapp. Berlin: Springer, 2017.
Victoria Johnson and Walter W. Powell, “Organizational Poisedness and the Transformation of Civic Order in 19th Century New York City” Pp.179-230 in Organizations, Civil Society, and the Roots of Development, edited by Naomi Lamoreaux and John Wallis. University of Chicago Press, 2017.
Aaron Horvath and Walter W. Powell, “Contributory or Disruptive: Do New Forms of Philanthropy Erode Democracy?” pp. 87-122 in Philanthropy in Democratic Societies, edited by Rob. Reich, Lucy Bernholz, and Chiara Cordelli, Univ. of Chicago Press, 2016.
Walter W. Powell, Christof Brandtner and Aaron Horvath, “Click and Mortar: Organizations on the Web,” Research in Organizational Behavior 36 (2016):101-120.
Hwang, Hokyu, and Patricia Bromley. 2015. “Internal and External Determinants of Formal Plans in the Nonprofit Sector.” International Public Management Journal 18(4): 568-588.
Chandler, David, and Hokyu Hwang. 2015.“Learning from Learning Theory: A Model of Organizational Adoption Strategies at the Microfoundations of Institutional Theory.” Journal of Management 41(5): 1446-1476.
Valeska Korff, Achim Oberg, and Walter W. Powell, “Interstitial Organizations as Conversational Bridges,” Bulletin of the Association of Information Science and Technology 41(2) Dec/Jan 2015: 34-38.
Patricia Bromley, Hokyu Hwang and Walter W. Powell, “Decoupling Revisited: Common Pressures, Divergent Strategies in the U.S. Nonprofit Sector,”M@n@gement, 15(5) (2013), 480-501.
Patricia Bromley and Walter W. Powell, “From Smoke and Mirrors to Walking the Talk: Characteristics and Consequences of Decoupling in the Contemporary World,” Academy of Management Annals, 6(2012): 483-530.
Hwang, Hokyu and Jeannette A. Colyvas. 2011. “Problematizing Actors and Institutions in Institutional Work.” Journal of Management Inquiry 20(1): 62-66.
Suárez, David. 2011. “Collaboration and Professionalization: The Contours of Public Sector Funding for Nonprofits.” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 21(2): 307-326.
Suárez, David. 2010. “Street Credentials and Management Backgrounds: Careers of Nonprofit Executives in an Evolving Sector.” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 39(4): 696-716.
Global Organization: Global Rationalization and ‘Organization’ as Scripted Actorhood
Drori, Gili S., John W. Meyer, and Hokyu Hwang. 2009. “Global Organization: Global Rationalization and ‘Organization’ as Scripted Actorhood.” Research in the Sociology of Organizations 27: 17-43.
Hokyu Hwang and Walter W. Powell, “The Rationalization of Charity: The Manifestations of Professionalism in the Nonprofit Sector,” Administrative Science Quarterly 54,2 (June 2009): 268-98.
Lost and Found in the Translation of Strategic Plans and Websites
Hwang, Hokyu, and David Suárez. 2005. “Lost and Found in the Translation of Strategic Plans and Websites.” In Barbara Czarniawska and Guje Sevon (Eds.), Global Ideas: How Ideas, Objects and Practices Travel in the Global Economy (pp. 71-93). Copenhagen Business School Press.
Additional Work on the Nonprofit Sector, with scholars from Stanford PACS
