Institutional Complexity and Nonprofits: The Influences of Institutional Logics, Professionalism, and Rationalization on Nonprofit Growth

• In Event: 436 - Regular Session. Non-Profit Organization: Resources, Growth, and Power

Abstract

Organizations receive symbolic and material resources from their institutional environments, and institutional embeddedness in multiple logics and organizational responses to external demands and pressures have important consequences for organizational growth and sustainability. We analyze how nonprofit embeddedness in different institutional logics as well as sector-wide pressures for heightened professionalism and organizational rationalization affect the long-term growth of service-providing charities. More specifically, we examine the effects of nonprofit embeddedness in the logics of community, the state, and the market (as measured from revenues generated from these three sources) as well as the level of professionalism and organizational rationalization on nonprofit growth between 2000 and 2008 using a random sample of nonprofit organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area in the United States.

Authors

• Hokyu Hwang, UNSW Australia Business School

• David F. Suarez, University of Washington