Third ISA Forum of Sociology (July 10-14, 2016)

218

How Responsible Are Nonprofits? Investigating the Relation Between Nonprofits and Their Stakeholders

RC17 Sociology of Organization (host committee)

Language: English

Nonprofits are a curious breed of organizations. They are private in nature and their working mechanisms vary greatly – from purely voluntary to highly entrepreneurial. Quite clearly, nonprofits differ from market and public organizations while, at the same time exhibiting characteristics of both sectors. Hence, it does not come as a surprise that their hybrid character has spurred extensive research on the different logics and structural arrangements that accompany their daily work.

In our session we focus on one specific aspect of nonprofit work: the plurality of stakeholders nonprofits face and have to cope with. As intermediaries between the world of commerce, civil society, the state, and other areas of society, nonprofits have developed a particular sense of responsibility towards their stakeholders. On the one hand, stakeholders are at the heart of the organization’s mission. On the other hand, issues of accountability, transparency and trust have become a somewhat salient and controversially discussed issue in the third sector. 
In this session, we call for papers which contribute to the sociology of third-sector organizations by:

• providing detailed empirical accounts that describe and interpret, or explain, the relationship between these organizations and their stakeholders;
• depicting boundary-spanning mechanisms operating in nonprofit organizations;
• describing how globalization processes challenge the relationship between nonprofits and their stakeholders;
• addressing the relevance of related literature so as to enable theorization, in particular on relational concepts such as accountability, responsibility and trust;
• discussing existing accounts of nonprofit accountability and transparency.

Posters: