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International non‐governmental organizations (INGOs) espouse principles of participation and empowerment, for the most part applied to INGOs' beneficiaries rather than their staff. Evidence from a study of seven INGOs operating in Kenya indicates that beneficiaries participate much less, and staff somewhat more, than INGO rhetoric would suggest. Although participation of both groups was limited, beneficiary involvement was episodic at best, whereas staff had continuous, albeit constrained access to regular meetings and other fora. The need to be accountable to donors was a major limiting factor. However, all stakeholders, including donors, share an interest in achieving long‐term results, and the evidence from the literature and our own empirical findings is that participation facilitates achieving those results. Thus, our study suggests that the ‘two participations’ can be reconciled through a focus on the long‐term interests of INGOs' intended beneficiaries. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Nonprofit and philanthropic studies (NPS) as an academic field grew over the past four decades. Academic centers are more flexible entities than traditional academic structures and as such play a central role in the field’s growth. Our study maps members of the Nonprofit Academic Centers Council (NACC) with specific attention on centers’ establishment and development. We survey NACC centers and review archival records to study NPS’s evolution. We find center creation clustered in the period 1999-2003, when a combination of external funding and academic growth created a favorable environment for academic entrepreneurs to establish academic centers. We illustrate two trends over the past decades. Academic centers increasingly emphasized a NPS disciplinary focus, while, in the same period, traditional university structures absorbed several centers. These two trends suggest contrasting narratives emphasizing either the field’s successful institutionalization or these centers’ loss of independence.

Nonprofit and philanthropic studies (NPS) is a visible presence at American universities and has achieved academic credibility. This study analyzes the role of academic centers devoted to the nonprofit sector in institutionalizing NPS as a distinctive academic field. It relies on a survey and selected case studies to map nonprofit academic centers and assess their field-building efforts. We find 55 US-based nonprofit academic centers that vary in size, revenue streams, and institutional location. Centers offer a broad range of services that span academia and practice supporting the local and regional nonprofit communities. Both endogenous and exogenous factors supported the founding of these centers, whose sustainability relies on interdisciplinarity, internal and external funding, and institutional support. We propose an evolutionary explanation for NPS’s institutionalization.

The dynamics of employment relations and HRM in non-profit organizations This special issue aims to build an original body of research and reinforce the foundation for the nascent field of non-profit human resource management (HRM) and employment relations. Non-profit organizations (NPOs) are defined by their mission (Drucker, 1992;Quarter, 1992). Thus, individual employees often perceive their relationship with the organization in terms of the mission and values that attract them to each non-profit (Ridder and McCandless, 2010). The processes, dimensions and outcomes of the nexus between employees and the mission play out mainly through employment relations and HRM. Research suggests that employment relations in NPOs are not only uniquely contextual due in part to the mission of the organization but also that this relationship is particularly multidimensional combining elements of social exchange, social movement, meaningfulness and strategy (Akingbola, 2013a;Bailey and Madden, 2015;Brown and Yoshioka, 2003;Cunningham, 2016). The nexus between employment relations and the mission is also likely to be constantly evolving in order to align with change in the operational environment.Moreover, NPOs are inherently complex, labour intensive and dynamically intertwined with their external environment in more ways than organizations in other sectors. The social and emotional transaction nature of non-profit services emphasizes the complexity of these organizations and the critical importance of employee labour (Akingbola, 2015;Resnick and Menefee, 1993). Work in NPOs is inherently labour intensive because their employees are often not distinct from the services of the organization (Akingbola, 2013b;Brunt, 2016). Due to the social and emotional interactions that underlie these jobs, employees and volunteers are the core asset of the non-profit (Kim, 2005;Light, 2003). Employees are integral to the service delivery, management and performance of nonprofits (Baluch, 2012).On the link with the environment, Akingbola (2013a) noted that there are three sources of resources and capabilities of NPOs: structural, institutional and values, all of which are embedded in the unique system-level and mission interaction of nonprofits (Baum and Oliver, 1991;DiMaggio and Anheier, 1990;Hansmann, 1980). Although these characteristics are evident in the systems and processes of the organization, it is perhaps in the domains of employment relations and HRM that these characteristics and their consequences are particularly least understood.The systems, processes and outcomes that underlie and drive workplace relations are therefore not merely the contextual and institutional factors, they are central to the fundamental characteristics of non-profit HRM. The system-level interactions in the contextual environment (Colbert, 2004) coupled with the expectations of the institutional setting (Baum and Oliver, 1991) likely combine the core elements that could drive employment relations and HRM in NPOs. This suggests that managing the non-profit wor...