Growing Pains: The Transformative Journey from a Nascent to a Formal Not-For-Profit Venture

Abstract

This article examines how a social venture transitions from nascent to formal status and argues that the transformation of the organization set in motion by establishing formal boundaries is a deeply profound one. Drawing from the nonprofit and social entrepreneurship literature on what prompts and energizes individuals to initiate new not-for-profit ventures, and linking it to a notion of revolutionary crisis as organizations emerge and develop, we seek to illuminate and explore the tension, and its consequences, between nonprofit entrepreneurs and the organization they create as the new venture transitions from nascent to formal. We do this by presenting the results from an in-depth case study examining the gestation and boundary-forming phases of Robert's Place Cooperative, a plucky start-up cooperative in a midsize Midwestern city.

The ambivalence of becoming a small business: Learning processes within an aspiring rock band

“…In this case, what are the challenges and practices of learning to handle the challenges and enduring as a small business? In organisation studies, a similar gap is identified by Edenfield and Andersson (2017), who point out that research on entrepreneurial organisations tends to take up-and-running organisational structures for granted, while ignoring the nascent stages and precarious interpersonal processes through which small businesses come about. However, the term ‘learning’ is ubiquitous in previous rock band research (e.g.…”

What Constitutes a New Nonprofit? Investigating Nonprofit Organizational Founding Dates

“…The notion that organizations are frequently, and deeply, impacted by prior experiences and events is sometimes referred to as organizational imprinting (Bryant, 2014), and illuminates that what happened early in the founding process is vital to comprehend the trajectory and undertakings at any of the later stages in the process. Edenfield and Andersson's (2018) study, for example, illustrates how the path from having the idea and intent to start a new nonprofit to the stage where the organization is operational was far from straightforward or easy: "[t]he nonprofit sector is often perceived and presented as a place with low entry barriers where eager entrepreneurs can, rather effortlessly, create new organizations. However, we believe such a view grossly underestimates just how demanding it is to actually concretize the idea of a new social venture into something substantial" (p. 1042).…”

“…The process of founding can also be observed in the nonprofit life-cycle literature, which recognizes that many undertakings in the gestation of a new nonprofit organization transpire before the new entity becomes a formal operational entity (Bess, 1998;Edenfield & Andersson, 2018), what Fredrik O. Andersson (2017) refers to as the nascent nonprofit stage.…”

“…Instead, Young presented a case based on a supply side perspective where new nonprofits do not simply emerge out of thin air but are the results of purposeful action undertaken by a nonprofit entrepreneurial agent (i.e., the founder). Young's work helped form the basis for nonprofit scholars interested in nonprofit entrepreneurship (e.g., (Bilodeau & Slivinski 1998;Cordes, Steuerle, & Twombly 2004), the emergence and entry of new nonprofit organizations (Dollhopf & Scheitle, 2016;Grønbjerg & Paarlberg, 2001), and for researchers analyzing nonprofits utilizing a life-cycle perspective (e.g., Bess, 1998;Edenfield & Andersson, 2018;Hasenfeld & Schmid, 1989).…”

“…The former perspective is commonly found in the sizable and robust macro-oriented nonprofit literature devoted to describing and understanding the size, scope, density, and growth of the nonprofit sector (Grønbjerg & Paarlberg, 2001;Lecy & Van Slyke, 2013;Liu, 2017), and the subset of this literature focusing on nonprofit sector entry by analyzing the number of newly founded nonprofits in a particular region or industry (Saxton & Benson, 2005;Twombly, 2003). The latter perspective, that founding is a process, is more prominent in the nonprofit entrepreneurship and nonprofit life-cycle research (Bess, 1998;Cordes et al, 2004;Dollhopf & Scheitle, 2016;Edenfield & Andersson, 2018;Lecy et al, 2016). Hence, the above-mentioned literature holds clues about how the nonprofit founding phenomenon is framed and operationalized.…”