The Cost of Accountability for Small Human Service Contractors

Never, Brent; Leon, Erwin de

doi:10.1080/23303131.2017.1302899

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…During the Great Recession, some nonprofits reported government contracts acted as buffers helping the nonprofit weather tough economic times (Salamon et al, 2009) by serving as a reliable funding source (Besel et al, 2011). However, unreimbursed costs harmed the accountability of human service nonprofits (Never & de Leon, 2017) and forced nonprofits to cut jobs and salaries (Never & de Leon, 2014). Park and Mosely (2017) found some human service nonprofits remained successful with government funding during the economic downturn, while others faced decline or were forced to turn to entrepreneurial strategies.…”

Section: Human Services During the Great Recessionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Within Source Diversification When the Going Gets Tough: Examining Alterations to Human Service Nonprofit Funding by Levels of Government

Piatak,

Pettijohn

2021

Journal of Health and Human Services Administration

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Government increasingly relies on nonprofit organizations to deliver public services, especially for human services. As such, human service nonprofits receive a substantial amount of revenue from government agencies via grants and contracts. Yet, times of crises result in greater demand for services, but often with fewer financial resources. As governments and nonprofits are tasked to do more with less, how does diversification within the government funding stream influence government-nonprofit funding relationships? More specifically, we ask: How do the number of different government partners and the type of government funder—federal, state, or local—influence whether nonprofits face alterations to government funding agreements? Drawing upon data from over 2,000 human service nonprofits in the United States, following the Great Recession, we find nonprofit organizations that only received funds from the federal government were less likely to experience funding alterations. This helps to illustrate the economic impact of the recession on state and local governments as well as the nonprofit organizations that partner with them.

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Section: Human Services During the Great Recessionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Within Source Diversification When the Going Gets Tough: Examining Alterations to Human Service Nonprofit Funding by Levels of Government

Piatak,

Pettijohn

2021

Journal of Health and Human Services Administration

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“…To cope in this landscape, organisations have increased their bureaucratic capacity by hiring more employees with academic backgrounds. Seen through the eyes of an economist, these are increased transaction costs in the form of personnel costs for preparing applications, negotiations with funding bodies and authorities, ongoing monitoring, control of acquired grants and continuous and time-consuming cooperation with the authorities extending the grants (FitzGerald et al, 2019;Never & Leon, 2017;Wiley & Berry, 2018). From a broader perspective, the criticism also refers to how this increasingly earmarked funding renders the organisations less welcoming for volunteers (Henriksen et al, 2008;Smith, 2018) and changes the organisational character from a solidarity ethos to professionalised and competitively oriented supplier (Milbourne & Murray, This criticism was challenged by Mulgan (2015), who claimed that voluntary social organisations have generally been better at promising than delivering results.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Transaction Costs in Voluntary Social Organisations

Clausen¹

2023

IJEF

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The increasing use of targeted social investments has led to relevant research interest in the transaction costs of social efforts. However, the majority of the research is characterised by the following two challenges: first, the analyses are often limited to public sources of revenue and, therefore, exclude private sources; and second, the transaction costs are measured based on self-declared information about administrative costs. The article contributes to the field of research in two ways. First, the contribution is made through an analytical model that brings together private and public revenue streams in a single model, providing a unique opportunity to compare the transaction costs from these two sources. Second, in this article, transaction costs are measured based on the actual development in the number of administrative academic full-time equivalents (FTEs) in the organisations. The latter attribute also achieves a better link to the theory in the field, which precisely focuses on administrative employees. The article derived data from a longitudinal dataset for 2012‒17 with the accounts for revenue in the nationwide voluntary social organisations and register data from Statistics Denmark on the education and working hours of employees in organisations. The article finds that targeted project funds (that is, earmarked funding) from private sources have significantly higher transaction costs than government project funds and general public operating grants. Smaller organisations were also shown to generally have higher costs when striving to secure funding than larger organisations with economies of scale.

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“…For at kunne klare sig i dette landskab har organisationerne øget deres bureaukratiske kapacitet, saerligt i form af flere ansatte akademikere. Set gennem en økonoms øjne er der tale om øgede transaktionsomkostninger i form af personaleomkostninger til udarbejdelse af ansøgninger, forhandling med fonde og myndigheder samt løbende monitorering, kontrol med erhvervede bevillinger samt løbende og tidskraevende samarbejde med de bevilligende myndigheder (FitzGerald et al 2019;Never & Leon 2017;Wiley & Berry 2018). I et bredere perspektiv indbefatter kritikken også, at den mere målrettede finansiering gør, at organisationerne bliver mindre imødekommende for frivillige (Smith 2018;Henriksen et al 2008), mindre politisk uafhaengige (Ibsen 2020) og aendrer organisatorisk karakter fra solidarisk ethos til professionaliserede og konkurrenceorienterede leverandører (Milbourne & Murray 2017), hvilket også kan reducere organisationernes rolle, som folkelige og demokratisk dannende institutioner (Boje 2017).…”

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Transaktionsomkostninger i frivillige sociale organisationer

Clausen

2021

NAT

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Stigende brug af målrettede sociale investeringer har medført en relevant forskningsmæssig interesse for transaktionsomkostninger i sociale indsatser. Men hovedparten af forskningen er præget af to udfordringer: Dels at analyserne oftest begrænser sig til offentlige indtægtskilder og således udelader private kilder, dels at transaktionsomkostningerne måles ud fra selvdeklarerede oplysninger om administrative omkostninger. Denne artikel bidrager til forskningsfeltet på to måder. For det første med en analysemodel, der samler private og offentlige indtægtskilder i én model, hvilket giver en unik mulighed for at sammenligne transaktionsomkostningerne fra disse to kilder. For det andet måles transaktionsomkostninger ud fra den faktiske udvikling i antallet af administrative akademiske årsværk i organisationerne. Derved opnås også en bedre kobling til teorien på området, som fokuserer på netop administrative medarbejdere. Artiklens datagrundlag udgøres af et paneldatasæt for perioden 2012-17 med regnskabsoplysninger om indtægter i de landsdækkende frivillige sociale organisationer samt registeroplysninger fra Danmarks Statistik om medarbejderes uddannelse og timetal i de samme organisationer. Det vises, at målrettede projektmidler fra private kilder medfører markant højere transaktionsomkostninger end både statslige projektmidler og faste offentlige bevillinger, og at mindre organisationer generelt har højere omkostninger ved at skaffe finansiering end større organisationer med stordriftsfordele.

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The Cost of Accountability for Small Human Service Contractors

Cited by 4 publications

References 44 publications

Within Source Diversification When the Going Gets Tough: Examining Alterations to Human Service Nonprofit Funding by Levels of Government

Within Source Diversification When the Going Gets Tough: Examining Alterations to Human Service Nonprofit Funding by Levels of Government

Transaction Costs in Voluntary Social Organisations

Transaktionsomkostninger i frivillige sociale organisationer

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