How Advocacy Nonprofits Interact With and Impact Business: Introducing a Strategic Confrontation and Collaboration Interaction Model (SCCIM)

• In Event: Strategic management

Abstract

This submission will be presented in video format.

Many issues of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are largely driven by unsustainable or exploitative production processes and outputs of companies. Advocacy nonprofit organizations (NPOs) are assumed to hold an inherent attitude or ideology that drives their strategic behavior toward corporations, according to the social movement and business management literature, which characterizes NPOs as either confrontational or collaborative.
However, a systemized overview of confrontational and collaborative NPO strategies and tactics towards business, that adopts an NPO-centric perspective, is currently lacking. This paper aims to fill this gap, proposing a descriptive NPO interaction model toward business.

The business management literature describes predominantly cooperative NPO-business interactions (Austin, 2000; Carroll et al., 2018; Kotler & Lee, 2005). Conversely, contentious relations towards business are emphasized in the social movement literature (den Hond & de Bakker, 2007; King & Pearce, 2010; Levy & Scully, 2007; Soule, 2009).
Stakeholder theory (Freeman, 2010; Mitchell et al., 1997; Savage et al., 1991) is the lens through which NPO-business interactions shall be assessed.

A case database comprising over 150 instances of NPO-business interactions is the empirical data set. The analytic strategy to categorize the delineated nonprofit-business interaction relied on cross-case pattern search (Eisenhardt, 1989). The definition of interaction typologies followed from comparing and grouping individual cases (Yin, 2009, p. 269), while comparing the findings to the literature (Eisenhardt, 1989).
With the stakeholder concept as cognitive frame, the business stakeholders involved in the NPO - business interaction became the main embedded unit of analysis (Yin, 2003, 2009).

Within the SCCIM, the horizontal strategic axis reflects the dichotomy between confrontation and collaboration as a conscious strategic choice for the NPO. In the confrontation quadrant, the NPO leads the initiatives, whereas in collaboration modes, business drives the interaction.

The vertical axis distinguishes between direct and indirect interaction modes.
Direct interaction envisages the organization at the forefront of the initiative. Thus, for direct confrontation, the NPO defines the project, whereas for direct collaboration, business leads the initiative.
Indirect interaction, whether confrontational or collaborative, is a strategic interaction mode that relies on salient business stakeholders to implement the initiative. In the indirect interaction mode, business stakeholders push for cause implementation while the organization, NPO or business, remains in the background. The organization operates as enabler for these stakeholders by providing them with information, tools, or a framework to act on their behalf.

Systematizing the full range of NPO interactions toward business from an NPO-centric perspective is both practically and theoretically relevant.
For practitioners, it offers NPOs a birds-eye view of overarching strategies and corresponding tactics, which serves to optimize campaigns against, and collaborations with, businesses.
Theoretically, the NPO-focused interaction model complements existing scholarly models e.g., the Collaboration Continuum (Austin, 2000), and thereby propounds an extension of the literature.
Foremost, the SCCIM builds upon and adds a novel aspect to the paradigm of stakeholder relevance for NPOs’ interactions with corporations.

References

NB: The content of this presentation has been published online October 24th 2023 in Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Quarterly (NVSQ) in open access under https://doi.org/10.1177/08997640231203629

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Author

• Maike Diepeveen, University of Eastern Finland