Relationships and resources: the isomorphism of nonprofit organizations’ (NPO) self-regulation

ABSTRACT

Self-regulation emerges as an option in response to government control of the institutional environment of nonprofit organizations (NPOs). While most research focuses on conceptualizing and arguing for self-regulation, this study examines self-regulation through the lens of the institutional perspective by focusing on a specific institutional domain of NPOs in Lebanon. Results indicate that a certain degree of normative isomorphism, through professionalization, has a positive impact on NPOs’ participation in self-regulation while mimetic practices do not yield the same results; coercive isomorphism is not a significant predictor. The results allude to certain implications both for management practices and for scholarly research.

KEYWORDS:

• Self-regulation
• NPOs
• institutional theory
• isomorphism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

^1. Reports indicate that approximately 700 of these organizations are active on regular basis (UNDP 2009).

^2. We also used an additive index of these practices, which resulted in a scale of 0 to 7. This variable is problematic because no weights were assigned to the individual forms of accountability, largely because it is difficult to assign the relative importance, expense or risk associated with each practice given the diversity of organizational situations and current literature provides little clarity on such weighting. Further, the results are fairly skewed with a majority of respondents clustered towards the lower end of the scale. Nevertheless, we ran both OLS and Poisson’s (the logic being that the adoption of self-regulation was a repeated activity even when the practices were different) regression analyses and found similar results, both in direction and in relative weight of the coefficients. This reinforces the logistic regression results reported on herein.

^3. Forty-one bodies in total, primarily of an international nature.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Khaldoun AbouAssi

Khaldoun AbouAssi is an assistant professor at the Department of Public Administration and Policy, School of Public Affairs – American University. His primary research focuses on public and nonprofit management, examining organizational capacity, resources and inter-organizational relations.

Angela Bies

Angela Bies is endowed associate professor of global philanthropy and nonprofit leadership at the School of Public Policy, the University of Maryland. Her research interests include comparative nonprofit and NGO regulation, accountability and governance; the emerging role of philanthropy in China; nonprofit capacity-building; and nonprofits and disasters. She also serves as a Co-Editor-in-Chief of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly.