Nonprofit Market Orientation and Strategic Presentations of Success: An Analysis of Higher-Education Access Nonprofit Organizations

• In Event: 50220 - Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 21: Meaning, Legitimacy and Professions

Abstract

Higher-education access nonprofit organizations (NPOs) are confronted with the need to gain two separate conceptualizations of organizational legitimacy: the procurement of operational funding and the altruistic advancement of community interests. Institutional theorists have developed two primary frameworks explaining how NPOs pursue these separate conceptualizations. The first framework posits that NPOs have oriented themselves in abidance to a quasi-market logic. The second framework posits that NPOs overcome these market pressures, through in-depth presentations of organizational values and programmatic success, termed supererogation, and orient their services in a manner in line with their responsibility to their service beneficiaries. I argue that both frameworks mistakenly assume that NPOs operate with a singular focus on one of the two conceptualizations of organizational legitimacy. I uncover patterns of NPO strategic navigation and hybridization by investigating the association between the extent to which an NPO engages in supererogation when presenting its programmatic success and the extent of an NPO’s quasi-market abidance. I then analyze NPO strategic behavior regarding this association on the basis of each NPO’s primary funding. My research concludes with a content analyses of all IRS Form 990 accomplishment sections in order to further understand the relationship between NPO conceptualizations and presentations of success, their market abidance, and their primary sources of funding. From such analysis I will be able to identify clusters of NPO strategic navigation as well as forms of NPO hybridization in the face of multiple conceptualizations of organizational legitimacy. The following paper intends to challenge the current literature’s assumption of absolute organizational disciplining or supererogation in the face of isomorphic environmental pressures. Through the identification of multiple clusters of NPO strategic navigation I intend to demonstrate the presence of both homogeneous and heterogenous organizational behavior from similar organization types within the same organizational field.

Author

• Jonathan Espinosa, University of Arizona