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The purpose of this article is to present an initial framework for understanding nonprofit board governance and then, using findings from the Urban Institute National Survey of Nonprofit Governance, explore relationships between variables presented in the framework. The framework is based on a recent review of the literature and highlights the ways in which internal organizational characteristics, board attributes, and the external environment influence board roles and responsibilities. In brief, our results confirm the importance of developing a more systematic body of knowledge about relationships between specific elements of context and board practices. The results suggest that the proposed contingency-based framework is a useful beginning point for future research.

This article begins to fill gaps that currently exist between research on the governance of nonprofit organizations and research on public governance and focuses on how nonprofit governance research can benefit from insights in the public governance literature. As boundaries between nonprofit governance and public governance are increasingly fluid, our theoretical understanding as well as our empirical work on governance must expand to encompass these new relationships. The article summarizes the extant empirical literature on nonprofit governance and compares this research to emerging work on public governance. Drawing on this literature, the article specifically calls for research on nonprofit governance that (a) gives greater attention to the links between organizational governance and the public interest, (b) incorporates a broader view of governance as a process engaging multiple actors and taking place at multiple levels, and (c) links governance to accountability for results.

AbstractThis article is a guide to over a hundred journal articles on strategic management in nonprofit organizations, published from 1977 to 1992 in nineteen leading general management or nonprofit journals. The guide provides brief summaries of articles, organized into widely accepted strategic management topic areas and research categories. The article indicates areas where substantial foundations of knowledge exist and where such bases are lacking. It distinguishes between works on general nonprofit management and those on empirical research.

AbstractThis article provides a detailed exploration of the collaborative architecture concept and its ability to deepen research on interorganizational collaborative arrangements. After introducing four components of collaborative architecture (goals, arenas, membership, and mechanisms), the article uses the components to compare two cases of public education reform collaborations. We investigate methodological challenges in coding and data analysis and evaluate the conceptual strengths and weaknesses of collaborative architecture, including the extent to which it lends specificity to existing frameworks for studying collaboration and collaborative governance. The article demonstrates that the collaborative architecture concept enables researchers to probe and assess important characteristics and relationships among goals, boundaries, structures, and processes of interorganizational collaboration as well as the exercise and embeddedness of partner influence.

Although the importance of the public policy environment for strategic action of nonprofit organizations has become increasingly clear, research on nonprofits is often divorced from their policy context. The purpose of this article is to present a theoretically informed framework for analyzing policy environments that can inform nonprofit research. Drawing on insights from political science, organization theory, public management, and nonprofit studies, the authors propose that the framework reflects a policy field that is an identifiable set of elements in a specific environment that directly shapes local public service provision. These elements include the structures created by institutions that deliver public programs and the ways in which state and local actors interact with and shape these structures as they work on public problems. Through a research example, the article presents the policy field framework's analytic steps.

Religiously affiliated providers of social services are becoming increasingly important in the transformation of social welfare policy in the United States. This article focuses on governance issues and challenges facing these small service providers. Using perspectives from the organization and management literatures and examples from prior research, the article makes three general observations. First, predictable patterns of governance exist, depending on the types of structural relationships religiously affiliated agencies have with their religious bases. Second, governance will be affected by particular characteristics of both small and religious organizations. Third, growth presents critical challenges to the ability of these providers to maintain their indigenous religious cultures. Hypotheses are offered to stimulate further research in each of these areas.

This paper presents results from a research study on charter school governance in Minnesota, the first state to enact charter school legislation in 1991. The paper examines the effects of the political and institutional environments on charter school governance, pays particular attention to how charter school boards navigate their legally mandated hybrid status, and analyzes the effects of hybridity on governance practices and school performance. The paper makes theoretical and empirical contributions to our understanding of governance in strong institutional environments and the implications of hybridity for governance practices. ; LBJ School of Public Affairs

This article presents a review and analysis of empirically based research on strategic management in nonprofit organizations reported in major journals from 1977 to the present. Although much work has been done on strategy formulation, types of strategies pursued, and implementation in nonprofits, significant gaps exist in our knowledge. Few explicit connections have been made among research studies, contributing to fragmentation of the field. Crucial relationships among strategy components are missing, and links between these components and organizational performance have yet to be made. The article analyzes what is known about strategic management in nonprofits and identifies questions for future research.