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In spite of the belief instilled by the New Public Management reforms that nonprofit organizations (NPOs) can benefit from more management, more measurement and more market practices, systematic knowledge on the organizational effects of NPOs incorporating business practices in their day‐to‐day functioning remains absent to date. This research note addresses this limitation by reviewing 49 research articles. The focus lies on the redefinition of nonprofits' mission and income streams, changing governance arrangements and shifting management practices. We find that, despite numerous detrimental effects cited in the literature, (a) generating commercial income can contribute to the financial stability of NPOs, and (b) hybridization towards the market domain can strengthen the organizational legitimacy of NPOs, suggesting that imitating for‐profit enterprises might contribute to nonprofit functioning in perception, rather than in practice.

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Despite widespread concerns about nonprofit organizations becoming “business-like” by hybridizing toward the market sphere, systematic knowledge about the extent and coherency to which this phenomenon finds traction beyond the liberal welfare context remains largely absent to date. Based on survey data ( N = 496), this study addresses this lacuna for the region of Flanders (Belgium), an emblematic case of a post-corporatist welfare state. We find that (a) business practices are on the rise yet not prominently present, and (b) the theorized conceptual coherence of this phenomenon corresponds with a more fragmented empirical reality. This raises the question to what extent the conception of nonprofit hybridization toward the market sphere as a “monolithic threat” to the distinctiveness of the nonprofit sphere is an empirical reality in a post-corporatist welfare context.

This article discusses the issue of democratic quality of area-based policy networks, with particular attention to the complex settings of network relations and to the changes in local regimes. It is argued that present associative and deliberative frameworks of democratic theory are useful but inadequate to enable proper assessments of multilevel and multiactor policy arrangements. The article therefore combines both frameworks with a contextualized and dynamic perspective and supports this position with a case analysis of a spatial planning network in Ghent, Belgium. It finds that in Flanders, local representative democracy was dominated by corporatism and party political arrangements, and emergent networks for spatial planning are replacing old corporatist arrangements in a new institutional framework for local representative democracy. The article concludes that analyzing area-based networks without analyzing changes in representative democracy in the same area can easily lead to biased conclusions.