Explaining Variations in the Founding Process among a Sample of Recently Founded Religious Nonprofits

• In Event: 262 - Section on Sociology of Religion Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 09. Church and Non-Church Organizations

Abstract

While the organizational founding process is subject to various isomporhic pressures, significant variation is still found in the completion, ordering, and timing of founding events. In this paper we present an analysis of an original survey of recently founded religious nonprofits to better understand the role that the founder's demographics, previous experience, and skills have in shaping the founding process. We find that older founders tend to complete the founding process faster and complete founding steps in a more common order. More highly educated founders tend to complete a wider variety of potential founding steps, as do those founders with prior employment as a religious nonprofit executive and organizations engaged in a wider range of activities. Male founders tend to follow a more typical order of founding steps. In short, our findings show that founder characteristics and organizational characteristics shape the founding process, but these effects vary across different dimensions of the founding process.

Authors

• Christopher P. Scheitle, Saint John's University

• Erica J. Dollhopf, Pennsylvania State University